Can you release a smaller subversion package?

[Gioele Barabucci <de...@gioelebarabucci.com>]

The current subversion package (1.1.3 tar.bz2) is about 6MB while it could be 
less than 3MB.

The package is so big because it includes some needed libraries (apr, 
apr-utils, neon) and other files (the complete site in the www/ dir, the 
compiled svnbook.{pdf, html} in the doc/book/book/ dir).

Can you please release a basic package along with this full-featured one?
It would contains the same files that are contained in the full package except 
apr/, apr-util/, neon/, www/ and doc/book/.

A basic package would be just 3MB in size, cost nothing to you, and be a big 
win for everybody with a limited bandwidth (read 56K).
A reduced source package would also save bandwidth (and space) for all the 
distro that distribute SRPM packages.

--
/Gioele

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Re: Can you release a smaller subversion package?

[Ben Collins-Sussman <su...@collab.net>]

On Mar 26, 2005, at 8:39 AM, Gioele Barabucci wrote:
>
> A basic package would be just 3MB in size, cost nothing to you, and be 
> a big
> win for everybody with a limited bandwidth (read 56K).

The tradeoff, though, is that users downloading a 3MB package would 
have to "know" to download apr, apr-util, and neon separately... or to 
make sure they're already installed via other means (through an apache 
installation, for example.)  How would we make sure they knew these 
things?

I would expect a flood of new questions:  "which tarball should I get?  
the big or the small one?"  Or even worse, "I tried to build the 
source, and it can't find APR.  Do I need that too?  Where do I get it? 
  Which version?"

The point of the tarball is to give a user everything he needs to 
build.  If you need only 'pure' svn source, and are willing to grab all 
the dependencies separately, then why grab a tarball at all?   Why not 
just checkout the release tag?


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Re: Can you release a smaller subversion package?

[Max Bowsher <ma...@ukf.net>]

Gioele Barabucci wrote:
> The current subversion package (1.1.3 tar.bz2) is about 6MB while it could 
> be
> less than 3MB.
>
> The package is so big because it includes some needed libraries (apr,
> apr-utils, neon) and other files (the complete site in the www/ dir, the
> compiled svnbook.{pdf, html} in the doc/book/book/ dir).
>
> Can you please release a basic package along with this full-featured one?
> It would contains the same files that are contained in the full package 
> except
> apr/, apr-util/, neon/, www/ and doc/book/.
>
> A basic package would be just 3MB in size, cost nothing to you, and be a 
> big
> win for everybody with a limited bandwidth (read 56K).
> A reduced source package would also save bandwidth (and space) for all the
> distro that distribute SRPM packages.

I find "cost nothing to you" bit a little galling. The one-time 
modifications to dist.sh aren't that big a deal, but there is then yet 
another package that needs to be tested, gpg-signed and uploaded - for every 
single release.

Ben has already pointed out the possible confusion that might be caused by 
having 2 packages.

If bandwidth minimization is your goal, you would be better off keeping a 
subversion working copy locally, which you can switch from tag to tag, thus 
downloading only the changes between each release.

Max.


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