Re: Some little proposals...

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

On 29 Mar 2001 09:23:05 +0200, Germano Rizzo wrote:
>     First of all, I'm referring to the packages I can find on ftp.gnome.org
> etc, not the helix/ximian ones, which are often a little bit outdated...
>     First, why not to use the bzip2 to compress the packages? It compress
> far better than gzip, even 700k less in some packages, and it's a standard
> just like gzip, nowadays... changing the "Source" field of the specfile
> makes it possible to build an RPM also from that, and also the resulting
> source RPM is thus smaller than the one built from a gzip tarball... and I
> guess that with a few changes to the scripts it could be realized some
> target "make bzdist" to create it directly... I think all the people who
> attempt to download the sources and compile them are basically skilled in
> the fundamentals of Linux/Unix, so they should know how to use, or where to
> get, bzip2...


I have now modified the script used to publish new packages on the FTP
server, and new packages shold be pushed with bzip2 support.  

I am not sure if we should do a pass at bziping the existing sources, I
certainly do not want to do it now overthe modem, I could do it next
week when I go back to Boston.

>     Second, the patch distribution system seems quite random... I mean,
> there are patches to pass from a version to another only for few programs,
> and they don't cover all the versions... I do know that not all the changes
> can be diff-ed, but IMHO with a little bit of attention when modifying the
> application, they could be considerably more...


That means that someone has not been using the publishing tool on the
system.  It should generate those patches for every release being
uploaded.  I would like also to move away from patch and start using
xdelta (so things like PNG images are included in the diff). 

Miguel.