Re: [OctDev] Regarding the MSYS installer

[Thomas W. <tw...@de...>]

On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 11:18:35AM +0200, Philip Nienhuis wrote:
> Admittedly there's some overhead inside. What's the problem with that?
> 
> On this box I have a complete MinGW/MSYS development environment 
> installed, plus 5 or 6 Octave-MinGW versions including MSYS + a lot 
> more. It takes up a bit of disk space, true, but these days that 
> shouldn't be a problem.

I suggest you take a moment and take SF's perspective.
>From their website, they say that they have had 4 millions downloads
*today*. Let's pretend that just 1% of those downloads included msys,
which has about 3 MB according to 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MSYS/Base/msys-core/msys-1.0.11/

That's 120 GB of network traffic on one(!) day just for MSYS.

If you were to distribute this via Amazon's S3 (0.12$/GB)[1], that's
roughly 12$/day. At the end of a year, that's 4000$ - again, just for MSYS.

FWIW, one of the reasons for dropping the m68k architecture from Debian
was the fact that a full Debian mirror exceeded 100GB in harddisk space
and most mirror operators could not justify that much space. 

Now, the numbers may vary (especially the 1% above is probably too
high), but then again we have only talked about msys and nothing else.
So please, don't take your local hard disk as reference for what forms a
problem in software distribution.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/de/s3/pricing/

	Thomas