 |
lua-l archive |
|
|
||
|
On Mar 7, 2013 2:55 AM, "steve donovan" <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 2:34 PM, Peter Drahoš <drahosp@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I would recommend using git to store the files similarly to what Homebrew[3] does. This would also allow multiple people to accept and review pull requests when using GitHub.
>
> That would be a technically satisfying solution, but not everyone uses
> Git or is comfortable with it (Personally for 'social development' I
> find github to be the best thing since sliced bread[1] but not
> everyone's favourite cup of caffiene)
>
> By just using the basics, HTTP, FTP and zip, one ends up with a simple
> pragmatic solution for busy people.
One important kind of user is one who lives off the grid. There are various reasons why one might do that.
The first is, of course, externally restricted access to the Internet. International phone data roaming counts. One of my friends is on his way back from Antarctica but they awesome net compared to a lot of places.
The second is stasis: do not let a change happen without my permission. This gets tied up in notions of reproducibility of results: old bugs which only get triggered are better than my system working and yours not because we picked different phases of the moon to pull.
The third is security review. This is a bit like the reproducibility case except with paranoia added to the obsessive-compulsive disorder. (The truly paranoid don't want anyone to know what they're interested in, which goes back to #1. These users don't talk to you of course.)
Finally, there are bureaucratic requirements which simulate the above. Several kinds of workplaces need to have manifests of all software brought in. In the United States, health care privacy has become a big deal and the response to this has often been to require TPS reports.
In short, the ideal package repository has revision tracking and can be burned to DVD for use on computers with a ping time measured in fortnights. At one point I had taken to carrying the Debian source discs with me, since all useful software seems to be in there somewhere....
What does this mean for LPAN? Well, git does an excellent job of working offline. It even caters to local private forks. Systems like OpenWrt don't store all their objects in version control—gcc-4.17.9.tar.gz is still fetched with wget. But ideally version control is recording checksums, and "make offline-download" should be able to cough up a script for all the non-tracked downloads for the selected packages and their dependencies.
Git has a lot of good things going for it. Don't go too far away.