Re: [Gnu-arch-users] New feature at the mirror + request for help

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "James" == James Blackwell <address@hidden> writes:

    James> You are overestimating the abilities of the next generation
    James> of arch users. What you see now are early adoptors. The
    James> arch user today is generally well educated and motivated to
    James> learn how to properly use tools. The next generation won't
    James> be so bad either.

    James> But the generation after that? Now you're dealing with the
    James> sort of crowd that needs warnings on knives that the edges
    James> are sharp.

Crack me up!  I don't think it's that bad for arch, but a couple of
the LUGs I'm on are seeing old (wise) people leave because the new
people are too "dumb and proud of it" to be borne.

What worries me about arch is that it's getting to the point where
even Gentoo has that kind of fan.  Now, Debian, Fink, the BSDs, and
Gentoo all allow some form of "build-from-source" where you get the
management benefits of the PMS while getting the bleeding edge source
from CVS.  This could be made much saner (at least in theory) with
arch, and with a little sugar coating, an arch-based source build
system probably would be more palatable to the crowd that uses
lawnmowers to trim their hedges than Gentoo.

    James> Tom Lord:

    >> Moreover, there is no good reason to preclude having multiple
    >> "exotic" applications layered on arch, each using a quite
    >> different naming authority.

I don't think they're all that exotic.

    James> There is a p2p app that you may not be familiar with called
    James> bittorrent.

Have these guys solved the problems that are pointed out in papers
like "Why Gnutella Can't Scale.  No, Really"?
http://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/doc/gnutella.html

And don't say "it's just a directory information service".  Some of
the guys I work with (not economists; it's a weird department) do
cell-phone network theory (and occasionally, practice).  At least in
that environment, you run into the same kind of problem (basically,
ping storms trying to find a server) just running a directory service.
I don't know enough to know if that is worrisome on the Internet at
the scales we're talking about.



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