On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 12:15:12PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > Craig Sanders <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > i remember a year or so ago when i complained about this worthless > > practice i said that it would end up consuming hundreds of megabytes > > - i was told that was ridiculous, it would never happen. > > Megabytes! Horrors. You counted up to 96 MB in your computation,
what computation? i provided an example directory listing taken directly out of my debian mirror. the approx 310MB came directly from du: falls:/home/ftp/pub/mirrors/debian/pool/main/k# du -sck kernel-image-*i386 14360 kernel-image-2.2.20-i386 3572 kernel-image-2.2.20-reiserfs-i386 7544 kernel-image-2.2.20-udma100-ext3-i386 14124 kernel-image-2.2.21-i386 14128 kernel-image-2.2.22-i386 85560 kernel-image-2.4.16-i386 76528 kernel-image-2.4.18-i386 96712 kernel-image-2.4.19-i386 312528 total "*i386" missed one, should have been "*i386*". add another ~20MB for: 19268 kernel-image-2.4.18-i386bf these figures don't include the alsa-modules or linux-wlan-ng kernel module packages that have to be compiled for each specific kernel (add another approx 17MB for those at the moment). > which I will assume to be correct. how generous of you. you could have quibbled about every line of the directory listing i provided, but you restrained yourself - for that small mercy, i will be forever in your debt. > Current cost of hard disk is something between $1.00 and $1.50 per > gigabyte. it's not just the cost of disk space, it's the cost of bandwidth too - and recurring bandwidth expenses cost a LOT more than disks (once-off capital expenditure) > Branden, could we afford to buy a couple 110 GB disks to hold this > increase? can debian afford to buy the same for every mirror too? or pay the bandwidth costs of about 100MB per debian release of each kernel version? at an average of 4 or 5 debian releases per kernel-image package, that's about 400 or 500MB per kernel version. bandwidth isn't free, nor is it universally cheap. some countries are still paying up to $0.20 per MB for downloads, or even more. work out the cost for your location. even in the US where bandwidth is relatively cheap, it still adds up to real money. every mirror has this expense, just to provide allegedly "optimised" kernels for people who are too lazy to compile their own, who probably wouldn't even notice the "optimisation" anyway. craig -- craig sanders <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Fabricati Diem, PVNC. -- motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch