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From: rsk@dcs.qmw.ac.uk (Bob Kemp)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development
Subject: Re: Comment on stuffing more on the boot floppies...
Summary: removing redundancy in 0.2 distribution sets
Message-ID: <C4svwF.9Ax@dcs.qmw.ac.uk>
Date: 1 Apr 93 10:31:27 GMT
References: <JDOLTER.93Mar30230743@sawtooth.eecs.umich.edu> <C4r5AF.9L2@dcs.qmw.ac.uk>
Sender: usenet@dcs.qmw.ac.uk (Usenet News System)
Organization: Computer Science Dept, QMW, University of London
Lines: 52
[I'm reposting this because the first one had only the default UK distribution.
Apologies if you've seen it before]
>I thought I would throw this idea into the ring .....
Oh well, here's another thought.
Many (most?) people will need the srcdist around for applying patches and
so (at the cost of some time) they could recompile everything.
Unfortunately, not everyone has enough disk space to hold all of
srcdist, let alone recompile it.
Why not split the bindist02 into two parts:
o those files essential for recompiling the system,
or which are which are not regenerated by a
make clean; make; make install
in /usr/src. For example the kernel, init, /bin/sh,
cc, make and libraries.
[bindist02a]
o the rest of bindist02
[bindist02b]
Anyone who wanted to save on ftp time, etc could just get bindist02a
and srcdist02. If you don't have space for srcdist02, then you
just fetch bindist02b instead.
A similar distinction could be made for srcdist02:
o sources for the kernel plus a few other bits
o the rest
It shouldn't be difficult to make extract handle bindist02 as just
bindist02a followed by bindist02b.
Admittedly, I haven't looked at the sort of savings that might be made but
it ought to save a few Mb. This would be especially useful (read cheaper)
for people getting the new versions by modem. It occurred to me as a more
efficient way of doing system backups to floppy (with tar, say), ie just
save /usr/src and the critical binaries.
Although it's more complicated, would it be worth it?
Bob
--
Robert Kemp Internet: rsk@dcs.qmw.ac.uk Phone: +44 71 975 5249
CS Dept, QMW, London Univ, Mile End Rd, London, E1 4NS Fax: +44 81 980 6533
"Rose bushes have thorns; thorn bushes bear roses"