Re: [Gnu-arch-users] archive storage format comments on the size

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Andrea Arcangeli <address@hidden>

    > On Mon, Sep 29, 2003 at 05:55:56PM -0700, Tom Lord wrote:
    > >     > From: Andrea Arcangeli <address@hidden>
    > >     > I forgot to tell one last important property of the [long highly
    > >     > speculative design idea.]

    > > That's ok.   Say less about these ideas in the first place, and we can
    > > ask followup questions about the ones that seem interesting.

    > Well, I thought it was easier to understand if I outlined the properties
    > of the superpatch. For istance I even myself didn't think immediatly at
    > the huge benefit it would generate during network transfer. That's why I
    > sent a second email.

I am trying to gently communicate that you don't really seem to have
enough overall feel for arch and tla to justify going way off the deep
end in terms of redesigning this or that, and that it's a bit
premature to write in so much detail about your alternative design
ideas.

Please don't get me wrong.  For many of us, a good way to learn a
system is to ask questions like ``Why is it like FOO?  Why isn't BAR
instead?''.

But my sense is that, in many many lines on the list, and generating
many many lines of replies, you're not stopping at those questions but
are instead eagerly evaluating ``BAR'' as far as you can.

A case in point is optimizing for `tla get'.  You asserted that
optimizing for any other operation in the archive format was
unimportant, and then generated quite a bit about how to optimize for
`get'.  We could have provided the most useful replies without those
N+1 additional pages -- just the general idea of what you were
thinking.

The size of list traffic has gone up sharply recently.   The
signal/noise ratio has fallen sharply.

I'm just trying to suggest how you can help to fix that.

-t