Gnucash Docs

[Geert Janssens]

On Thursday 14 January 2016 11:10:11 Plutocrat wrote:
> Just thinking out loud here. Every time a new version of gnucash is
> updated, my package manager downloads it (around 10Mb), but also
> downloads the gnucash-docs package, which is around 100Mb. As this is
> hosted on getdeb, it takes around an hour to get this one package
> (20kb/s currently).
> 
> So I'm thinking that there probably isn't 100Mb of changes to the docs
> each time. Is there a more efficient way of making this available?
> 
>  - I notice that English, German, Japanese and Italian documentation
> are downloaded. Would it make more sense to split these packages up?
> 
That could probably be done, however this is really a suggestion for the packagers for your 
distro (or getdeb maintainers), not the gnucash developers.

>  - Is there some way of sending the package as a 'diff' i.e. only the
> documents that have changed. I'm guessing not, otherwise apt, yum etc
> would do this already.

Actually on my fedora system yum (or its recent replacement dnf) does this where the diff 
proves smaller than the full download. I haven't followed the most recent gnucash update on 
my system, but I'm sure recently dnf only downloaded delta-rpms for lots of packages. This 
delta-rpm is then locally converted in a full rpm to be installed. I don't know if apt has a similar 
option.

> 
>  - Could the gnucash-docs installer, instead of actually physically
> downloading all the files every time, just run an rsync (or git
> update) to pull the files that have changed down from a central
> server.
> 
That would indeed also reduce the bandwidth usage. Unfortunately I don't know any package 
manager on linux distributions that support this. And it would have its own challenges. 
Package signing would have to be revisited, rsync doesn't protect against accidentally 
overwriting files from another package and so on.

That said, I don't think the current package managers are the perfect solution as they are now. 
And that world is in motion as well: I see several initiatives to make it easier to install 
packages that are not part of distributions (and to accommodate 3rd party developers). 
Unfortunately for you those initiatives tend to use rather more bandwidth than less. Perhaps 
now is a good time for you to speak up in those discussions and point out not everybody have 
semi-unlimited bandwidth.

> Just thinking out loud. Possibly its too much work to do this for the
> few users who live in low-bandwidth environments.

It's fair enough to bring this up. As said in the beginning, the suggestions you make are more 
geared towards distro package maintainers than towards the gnucash developers.

On the other hand, we are distributing a Windows and OS X installer ourselves. So we could do 
some introspection to check if there's something we can do there to reduce bandwidth usage. 
I'll honestly say though it's low on my personal priority list.

Regards,

Geert