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Re: [Conclusion] Subversion 1.3 distribution tar slimmer?

From: Erik Huelsmann <ehuels_at_gmail.com>
Date: 2005-09-02 08:42:08 CEST

On 9/1/05, David James <james82@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/1/05, Ben Collins-Sussman <sussman@collab.net> wrote:
> > The vocal minority, in this case, seems to be a group of people who
> > are not packagers, but for some reason (either because they use an
> > obscure OS, or choose to ignore existing binary packages) build every
> > release from tarball. I still don't understand why this change would
> > be more than a one-time inconvenience for such people. The first
> > time they build from tarball, they need to fetch dependencies.
> > Everytime thereafter, the dependencies are already installed.
>
> It may be a one-time inconvenience to install dependencies, but it's a
> large inconvenience if you work with a system that does not have
> binary packages for the Subversion dependencies. On the systems I work
> with, I am not a root user, so I am unable to install binary packages.
>
> Because Subversion releases ship with many of its dependencies,
> Subversion is refreshingly easy to install.

Ok.

> I don't think would be a good idea to just "stop shipping
> dependencies". Why get rid of a great feature, that makes Subversion
> much easier to configure and install, just so that we can have a
> smaller download?

It's not the size of the download, what people read into combined
shipping: the blessedness as well as the "requires exactly this
version".

Besides that, Justin says "what if the system has a buggy APR?": I can
say exactly the same the other way around: what if we ship 1.3.0 next
month and 2 days later APR 0.9.7 comes out? It may take months for a
new release to be done (yes, even patch), so people will be installing
buggy APRs everywhere without even noticing!

But, if there's one single place where you can download all sources
including that of the deps, then we could replace APR 0.9.6 with 0.9.7
immediately without doing a new release.

> We can accomplish the same goal without causing users pain by
> splitting Subversion into two packages:
> 1. Subversion Core
> 2. Subversion Dependencies
> - apr
> - apr-util
> - neon

But if you sign the subversion dependencies package, you - again -
won't be able to update an APR version with the latest and most
blessed version.
I actually don't see why downloading and untarring 4 files - followed
by our current build - would be very much more inconvenient than
downloading 1 file and doing our current build...

> If you want a quick download, you can just download the Subversion
> Core. If you find out you're missing dependencies, you can download
> the "Subversion Dependencies" package. Either way, you'll never have
> to complete more than two steps to install a Subversion release.

Again, it's not the size of the download, but what the combined
shipping implies to people.

bye,

Erik.

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Received on Fri Sep 2 08:42:54 2005

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