Some little proposals...

["Germano Rizzo" <manomano ciaoweb it>]

Hi!
    I'm a linux user, and I'm very fond of GNOME... As many people, I guess,
I "only" have a 56k modem, with a dialup connection that I pay... and not so
cheap, in particular for a student. I'm disappointed with two details of the
current GNOME distribution system, and IMHO they could be helped with small
effort!
    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etc, not the helix/ximian ones, which are often a little bit outdated...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...
    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...
    I don't write this with the intent to be pesky, but only because at the
moment, it's impossible for me (and many other people, I guess) to take the
pace of the GNOME project... I just can't download many megabites one day,
and the following day discover that I have to download all over again... and
this for many more than a couple packages!! I know that it is endemic in a
project of this ambition, but I just wanted to suggest how an user's pain
can be eased with a small effort... just my 2 cents! :)
    Have a really nice day,
        mano :))

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