Re: Downloads

[Gerald Pfeifer <pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at>]

On Thu, 15 May 2003, Joe Laffey wrote:
>> This is an excellent suggestion, and unless there are strong objection,
>> I will move all components and diff files into new subdirectories called
>> "components" and "diffs", respectively, tomorrow morning.

As a startet, I have just moved the diffs into a new subdirectory "diffs/"
on gcc.gnu.org, and I will hack an update for the release script to do
that automatically in the future.

> I might suggest notifying the mirror operators if possible, as changing
> the structure could mess up some mirroring scripts (or cause two copies
> of everything, one in the old location and one in the new).

Unfortunately, we don't have a good way of informing mirror operators; at
some point, we probably want to add an announcement-only list where mirror
operators can subscribe to.

On Fri, 16 May 2003, Volker Reichelt wrote:
> BTW, does anybody actually *use* the seperate components?

Yes; for example the FreeBSD ports collection has several ports doing so
(though mostly to avoid wasting bandwidth for Ada these days).

Joe, do you have an estimate how many users obtain _only_ components, but
not the full archive?

> The same holds for the snapshots. It would probably make more sense
> to add snapshots for 3.4 instead.

At least until 3.3.1 we should stick snapshots to the branch, but in
general, I have received various requests to provide snapshots for the
active release branch _and_ mainline, and I'll soon make a proposal to
that end.

If we want to save further bandwidth, we could ship snapshots only in .bz2
format, similiar to GDB.

Plus, I have some further plans for our snapshots, mostly based on user
feedback and requests.  Please hold out. :-)

Gerald
-- 
Gerald "Jerry"   pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at   http://www.pfeifer.com/gerald/