[gentoo-dev] Re: Bug #565566: Why is it still not fixed?

[Duncan]

Vadim A. Misbakh-Soloviov posted on Wed, 24 Feb 2016 10:38:55 +0600 as
excerpted:

>> Is this actually true?  For the typical use case of daily or close to
>> daily updates I'd think that git would be much more efficient.

> As there were noticed multiple times on the list already, this should
> not ever happen, at least, until git will support resumable
> fetches/clones/whatever. Otherwise you'll make a lot of people, using
> bad quality internet access, to frustrate.

[I was confused at first as your response has little or nothing to do 
with the bit you quoted, but rather, with the idea of switching from 
rsync to git, in general.]

While I agree that git not being able to resume is certainly a serious 
pain for those with unreliable connections, they should be able to switch 
to webrsync, should the rsync method itself be deprecated.  As I've said, 
git syncing can't replace webrsync security, so webrsync will need to 
stay around for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, deprecated doesn't necessarily mean shut down or entirely 
unsupported.  Indeed, the implication is that it continues to stay around 
for quite some time, or rsync (or at least support for it) would be 
dropped, not deprecated.  It simply means that the handbook, etc, will 
stress non-deprecated alternatives instead of deprecated ones, and that 
over a period of years, the need for rsync mirrors will go down such that 
eventually, perhaps one per region/continent will suffice, and perhaps 
ultimately, only one period, instead of the multiple per continent we 
tend to have now.

Most of the others would presumably be converted to git and tarball 
mirror resources, with a few converted to webrsync instead, since it'll 
no doubt get some uptick in usage as rsync fades out.

But given the installed base and the number of folks already using rsync 
that wouldn't see a reason to change, this deprecation and phase down 
would be on the scale of years, three years at absolute minimum I 
suppose, and more likely 5-10 years.

Do you realize just how long 10 years is in Linux distro terms?  Gentoo's 
certainly past that now, but who knows what will happen in ten years?  
Gentoo itself may no longer be around by then, or maybe it'll be around, 
but will only have enough users for a single mirror or two.  Or maybe 
hardware advances will be such that building from sources will be trivial 
by then and gentoo will either be a top-three distro again or everybody 
and their brother will be doing from-source distros and there will be as 
many of them as there are binary distros now.

And of course what happens to a good portion of those presently flaky 
connections over another decade is just as up in the air.  Ideally, it 
wouldn't be a problem we'd have to worry about by then, but I don't think 
anyone considers that likely.  OTOH, it could be that more people are 
moving to mobile-only by then, and a /lower/ percentage of gentooers have 
reliable high-bandwidth connections that don't cost an arm and a leg per 
gigabyte.

But regardless of why or how, I don't expect gentoo rsync syncing to have 
anything like the same level of usage, a decade from now.  Maybe it'll 
still be around, with one or a half dozen gentoo rsync mirrors, but I 
don't expect there will be a need for the several per region that many 
regions have now.  Of course I could be wrong, but I just don't see it.

(And yes, I'm posting this in the full awareness that someone could 
dredge it from the archives a decade from now and point out how wrong I 
ended up being.  In part that's why the "I could be wrong", to cover my 
bases, but I /still/ don't see it, and if it happens to be, my present 
self will be quite surprised, tho my future self might well find that in 
hindsight it should have been predictable, and I just didn't see it.)

IOW, it's nothing individual users need to be concerned about in the near 
term (out to three years or so), /probably/ nothing they need to be 
concerned about in the intermediate term (say 3-6 years), and beyond 
that, so much is likely to have changed that any predictions made now are 
certain to have missed important events that drastically change the way 
we look at things in the mean time, and thus be rather off base.

After all, git itself is only from 2005, 11 years ago, and ten years ago 
today, while it was definitely used for the kernel, I doubt that anyone 
would have predicted it would have pretty much taken over the (D)VCS 
landscape like it did, github and all.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman