This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2000 21:31:01 -0700 To: svlug@svlug.org Subject: Re: [svlug] Want a dial up server! From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> begin David E. Fox quotation: > I tried pulling down Debian sometime back (using the DSL at my > brother's (mom's) house) -- perhaps it was the server, but it took > several hours nonetheless. But why do that? There's really no point in pulling down an entire set of the many thousands of packages comprising a Debian development branch (such as 2.2/potato) -- unless you're setting up a mirror site. According to my sent-mail archive, you and I discussed exactly that in May 1999 (on svlug@svlug.org). We discussed, then, how and why one would preferentially install only the desired components of a distribution (as opposed to retrieving it wholesale). Many SVLUG participants assume that a "kitchen sink" installation is inherently a good thing, and we discussed the drawbacks of that assumption, too. > What would be cool -- maybe this is already present, I don't know -- is a > reference archive that would just let you pull the whole thing (of course, > for Debian that's not really the right thing to say) via rsync. Again, the _only_ practical reason I can think of for pulling down an entire Debian branch -- let along all 15GB comprising all named branches for all architectures -- is to set up a full or partial Debian mirror. The standard method is indeed rsync. The standard rsync script for this (and list of official mirrors) is at http://www.debian.org/mirror/ ===