600 Meg with my 33K modem?
One of my complaints about Debian is the obnoxious amount of bandwidth it takes if you want to stay on the bleeding edge. I usually upgrade my systems (that are running the unstable branch) once a week, and the download is usually 30-40 Megs each week. This is not so much a problem for me with non-metered local calls and unlimited bandwidth ISP, but for people in other countries it can be a problem.
If an upstream maintainer fixes a spelling mistake in an 800K package, the whole package is re-downloaded.
This will only get worse with time. The distro now takes 2 CD-ROMS just for the binary distribution... and it takes 5 CDs if you also want all the source and the non-free stuff.
I don't know how RH handles this, but Debian has a shitload of mirrors all over the world to take the load. If the user-base keeps expanding, and everyone had cable modems, I'm sure they would have to have some sort of bandwidth shapers to limit the amount of downloading from overloading the servers.
Of course, Debian doesn't make any money off of CDs, so they don't have the motivation to limit downloads unless absolutely necessary.
If I ran RH, I would have each 600Meg download fail at the 582Meg mark. And I would unleash a virus on all the sites that offer $2 RedHat CDs. Then, you would see more revenue coming in... <G>
-Mitch |
