Re: ftp mirrors

[Andrew Cagney <ac131313@cygnus.com>]

Jason Molenda wrote:

> ??  Rsync recognizes blocks of data.  It doesn't interpret the
> syntax of a .c file, run an SGML parser on an .html file, or try
> to parse the English sentences in a .txt file.  A block of random
> data and a block of human-readable data are little different to
> rsync.

Given two nightly snapshots there are very few differences.  Once the
tar ball has gone through gzip, however, all similarity is lost.

Its a lot more efficient to rsync the uncompressed tar-ball than it is
to down load the compressed version (well it is for me :-).

> Are you making this all up on your own - assuming that there is a
> problem - or is there some actual evidence of a problem?  I don't
> mean to be harsh, but I seem to be engaged in an intellectual
> discussion of the tone "I bet rsync is slow doing foo and we should
> change how we do things.  Someone should prove to me otherwise."

Not so much a problem of ``rsync is slow'' but rather, is there a better
way.  

One issue raised by individual testers during the gdb 5.0 release
process was the logistics of repeatedly draging down 10mb tar-balls. 
Next time around I'll have the un-compressed tar ball available.  It
occures to me that this could be scaled :-)

	enjoy,
		Andrew