[sword-devel] Remote Module Repository Wiki

[Greg Hellings]

On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 8:28 AM, Jonathan Morgan <jonmmorgan at gmail.com> wrote:
> A lot here depends on evaluation of pros and cons.  I personally support
> HTTP, zipped modules, and one central file (like mods.d.tar.gz) to give a
> list of all the books and where to find them for at least some of the
> following reasons.  I will try and capture why succinctly:
> For ZIPs:
> 1. Minimising the number of GETs issued (and potentially file size and
> download speed): I think this is particularly important for loading the
> initial list of modules, which should preferably be as fast as it possibly
> can be.  It also makes a difference for image modules like Dore's Woodcuts
> with lots of loose files (which I remember taking a very long time to
> install with Install Manager).

I'm not sure what your metrics are, but Ubuntu's apt for me hits about
70+ files on a half dozen or more servers to update its cache and this
takes less than 2 seconds.  It takes installmgr almost no time to
process a single refresh.

The main problem is that we are not setup to handle display from
multiple sources and also not to refresh from all the repositories at
once, they have to be refreshed one at a time.  This isn't so ideal to
the user's experience, but that's how it is done.  I really doubt we
need to worry about the performance of hitting 30 or 40 repositories
if that is what the user selects to enable - and if we do, then that
indicates we need to rethink how we're hitting the repositories,
because the limit certainly isn't the number we'd be hitting at that
point.

--Greg