Hi people!

(back from China)

"Andreas Raab" <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hm... does anyone besides me see the irony of this thread considering Gorans
> recent rant on the dangers of package universes?! To quote Goran:
> I 
> > But I am very afraid of the effects when people start setting up their
> > own little maps all over the place with lots of duplication, redundancy,
> > synch problems, servers being down/up, servers simply being unknown
> > etc... well. Obviously this doesn't scare you at all, which I don't
> > understand why.
> >
> > These are the things I can already hear:
> >
> > "Hey! Where did you find that? Oh, I didn't know about *that* server....
> > Hmmm, it isn't up now, do you have a copy you can email me?"
> 
> It seems that a decentralized system (as always) outperforms any centralized
> one when it comes to resiliency. Point in case: While SM is down and out,
> the package universes are up and running.

I am pretty sure it is not a "point in case". I assume that package
universes is as vulnerable as SM - or does it have mirrors?

Colin and others have already replied and pointed out the important
aspects, but what the hell:

- I am NOT against multiple servers. In fact, mirror servers is pretty
high up on the todo - but as you *may* be aware of people are screaming
louder for dependencies. In fact - if Andreas or anyone else perhaps
would like to help me write the few lines of code for making a mirror
server you are most welcome to help. Just write and ask me what needs to
be done and I will guide you. Bah, whatever - I will do it myself.

- Secondly, the package loader should work just fine if you just skip
the call to "SMSqueakMap 
default loadUpdates". You will get the loader up and everything and
everything should work just fine except for the fact that the map is not
updated until the master server is back online. In fact, I thought it did open
up fine after saying it couldn't connect to the master - perhaps I was wrong.

IMHO this thread/posting proved *my* point though. Suddenly when one
"map" was down (SM in this case) someone had to ask for an alternative
and had to be told about it. In short - *that* is exactly what I was
talking about regarding multiple maps. Granted - SM is vulnerable at
this time because it has no mirrors - but again, that is EASY to add.

And lastly - Andreas, you know perfectly well that I am NOT against a multi-
server solution. But I AM against an unknown number of multiple logical maps,
or at least I am against that being the preferred way. I want a system with ONE
map, though distributed and fault tolerant that also permits private or semi-private
additional map content - but typically for everything *public* I want a SINGLE map.

Over and out.

regards, Göran