[advocacy-discuss] ipkg image-update woes - worldwide opensolaris mirrors will help opensolaris adoption rates

[Richard Frost]

I love the new OpenSolaris build and have been promoting it to friends
however there is in my mind a major problem with updates that makes it near
impossible to update your install unless you are in the United States. As I
am used to the ease of Ubuntu updates where my local ISP mirrors the repos,
updates are painless and easy and fast.

I did a traceroute from my machine to the single OpenSolaris repo and
counted over 22 hops! ;-(

I have seen a number of posts from people complaining about pkg image-update
failures - I just cant update to build 90/91 - the best I get is 30% to 40 %
then the whole process dies in a heap and leaves a trail of incomplete ZFS
root snapshots which I had to manually remove with beadm. Its unfortunate
that pkg image-update does not resume where it left off - it just goes and
creates a new snapshot and starts all over again ;-(

I know this is a work in progress, but is it possible to have at least ONE
mirror of opensolaris packages hosted by Sun in each major country - at
least Australia as our overseas links are not that great.

If we want more users to come on board, I think that the whole process of
system updates should be smooth and fast and in my mind, this is a major
deal breaker for newcomers who will just go back to their old OS which has
decent update support.

Cheers
Richard
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