On Mon, 25 Aug 2008, David C. Rankin wrote:-
24G ./10.1 19G ./10.2 15G ./10.3 2.8G ./11.0
Shoot, David, looks like I was a bit conservative, but the
largest release I see is 10.1 at 24G, I guessed 25G, my calibrated guessing machine missed by less than 5% ;-)
Ah, but that 24G is just for the update mirror. You also included packages from the build service and the installation source as well. As I don't have a 10.1 mirror, and used the DVD contents as the mirror for 10.2, their figure is on the low side. If I use that for the 10.3 source, which is 17G, add on a similar size for the updates, you're already at 41G before even touching the build service. Unfortunately, there isn't an ls-lr.gz file showing what's present so, without locally mirroring it and finding out yourself, or having Novell or a mirror operator give out the figures, no-one is going to really know.
Seriously, let's assume then that storage requirements for "a
release" (which would include x86, x86_64, and ppc) maxes out at 100G, then on a standard server hard drive of 500G, we should be able to hold all packages for the current plus the past 4 releases. That would at least take us back to 10.0, assuming each release required 100G.
It would, but then you have to take into consideration the fact that it doesn't just reside on Novells servers. There's a lot of mirrors that wouldn't be happy about holding 500GB of just openSUSE packages, when they're mirroring quite a few other distros, and other software as well.
However, based on your statistics above, an based upon
recollection of the cd's from the 8.0 days, it would appear that many releases could live in 50G or less.
Probably for those versions up that were unsupported by the build service. However, once that was brought online, everyone and anyone could start building their own software and the space required probably shot up very rapidly.
I will guess again that Novell/openSuSE has much more spare storage sitting idle than 500G in capacity. Once somebody copied the files and provided the links, then the overhead is done until there is a drive failure.
As above, that's probably okay for Novell. It probably won't be okay for the mirrors.
Yes, everyone should upgrade, but for virtually no-cost Novell
could benefit the user base and really market the heck out of the fact that updates through end-of-life are available for all its releases.
It would be nice if they left the previously EOL'd release until the next one goes EOL. E.g. leave 10.2 available up until 10.3 is EOL'd. That would give the users plenty of time to create their own mirror, if they need it. However, it still uses up lots of space on mirrors that they may want to commit to other things. Regards, David Bolt -- Team Acorn: http://www.distributed.net/ OGR-P2 @ ~100Mnodes RC5-72 @ ~15Mkeys SUSE 10.1 32 | | openSUSE 10.3 32b | openSUSE 11.0 32b | openSUSE 10.2 64b | openSUSE 10.3 64b | openSUSE 11.0 64b RISC OS 3.6 | TOS 4.02 | openSUSE 10.3 PPC | RISC OS 3.11 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org