Re: another approach to what current does

Alex -

> By the way, this is the only response i got to my emails. My intention is
> not to compete with your product, but to introduce another one, in a
> somewhat different scale, that will respond to population other then your
> target population. I simply would like to talk to one of the developers to
> see if we can work together - I don't think that this can be considered a
> waste of time, because my project is a valid, working idea.
        Althought I'm not debating that nrh works for you in your
environment, I personally don't believe it will continue to work for
very long.  It gives me some ideas, which I'll get into arguments with
Hunter about later, for separating authentication from everything else,
but it has what I see as some fairly major flaws.

        First, and foremost to my mind, it has absolutely no way to
distinguish between architectures.  The client doesn't always determine
which architecture of a given package is pulled - the server will
sometimes override the client, or say "no, use this one - it's better".

        Second, it's unable to resolve dependencies, which is one of the
bigger parts of what RHN/up2date buys you over running Slackware (again,
IMHO).  That's actually the largest part of the server code, is
remembering all the dependency information and solving it properly when
a client connects and asks for updates.

        Third, it's unable to learn the concept of channels, which is
kinda critical to any future development of a server for up2date -
up2date without the ability to do channels is kinda like Red Hat Linux 
without the ability to do RPM - it's not.

        I agree, it's certainly not a waste of time, because we (or I,
more specifically) have already stolen some ideas from nrh (I just have
to actually make them work in code, now), but given that Current 1.3
uses Apache to achieve the same level of scalability connection-wise and
that it's about the same amount of work (from what I've read so far) to
set up either a Current 1.3.x server or an NRH server, I'm dubious as to
how long NRH will survive in the wild.

-- 
Thank you,
John Berninger

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