We have this guy saying we cannot build all the Alpine packages once to share with all Alpine users. Unsustainable!
On the other hand, we have the Gentoo crowd advocating for rebuilding everything from source for every single machine.
In the middle, we have CachyOS building the same x86-64 packages multiple times for machines with tiny differences in the CPU flags they support.
The problem is distribution more than building anyway I would think. You could probably create enough infrastructure to support building Alpine for everybody on the free tier of Oracle Cloud. But you are not going to have enough bandwidth for everybody to download it from there.
But Flatpak does not solve the bandwidth problem any better (it just moves the problem to somebody else).
Then again, there are probably more Apline bits being downloaded from Docker Hub than anywhere else.
Even though I was joking above, I kind of mean it. The article says they have two CI/CD “servers” and one dev box. This is 2025. Those can all be containers or virtual machines. I am not even joking that the free tier of Oracle Cloud ( or wherever ) would do it. To quote the web, “you can run a 4-core, 24GB machine with a 200GB disk 24/7 and it should not cost you anything. Or you can split those limits into 2 or 4 machines if you want.”
For distribution, why not Torrent? Look for somebody to provide “high-performance” servers for downloads I guess but, in the meantime, you really do not need any infrastructure these days just to distribute things like ISO images to people.
There are other costs, too. Someone has to spend a LOT of time maintaining their repos: testing and reviewing each package, responding to bugs caused by each packaging format’s choice of dependencies, and doing this for multiple branches of supported distro version! Thats a lot of man hours that could still be used for app distribution, but combined could help make even more robust and secure applications than before.
And, if we’re honest, except for a few outliers like Nix, Gentoo, and a few others, there’s little functional difference to each package format, which simply came to exist to fill the same need before Linux was big enough to establish a “standard”.
Aaaanyway
I do think we could have package formats leveraging torrenting more though. It could make updates a bit harder to distribute quickly in theory but nothing fundamentally out of the realm of possibilities. Many distros even use torrents as their primary form of ISO distribution.
We have this guy saying we cannot build all the Alpine packages once to share with all Alpine users. Unsustainable!
On the other hand, we have the Gentoo crowd advocating for rebuilding everything from source for every single machine.
In the middle, we have CachyOS building the same x86-64 packages multiple times for machines with tiny differences in the CPU flags they support.
The problem is distribution more than building anyway I would think. You could probably create enough infrastructure to support building Alpine for everybody on the free tier of Oracle Cloud. But you are not going to have enough bandwidth for everybody to download it from there.
But Flatpak does not solve the bandwidth problem any better (it just moves the problem to somebody else).
Then again, there are probably more Apline bits being downloaded from Docker Hub than anywhere else.
Even though I was joking above, I kind of mean it. The article says they have two CI/CD “servers” and one dev box. This is 2025. Those can all be containers or virtual machines. I am not even joking that the free tier of Oracle Cloud ( or wherever ) would do it. To quote the web, “you can run a 4-core, 24GB machine with a 200GB disk 24/7 and it should not cost you anything. Or you can split those limits into 2 or 4 machines if you want.”
For distribution, why not Torrent? Look for somebody to provide “high-performance” servers for downloads I guess but, in the meantime, you really do not need any infrastructure these days just to distribute things like ISO images to people.
There are other costs, too. Someone has to spend a LOT of time maintaining their repos: testing and reviewing each package, responding to bugs caused by each packaging format’s choice of dependencies, and doing this for multiple branches of supported distro version! Thats a lot of man hours that could still be used for app distribution, but combined could help make even more robust and secure applications than before.
And, if we’re honest, except for a few outliers like Nix, Gentoo, and a few others, there’s little functional difference to each package format, which simply came to exist to fill the same need before Linux was big enough to establish a “standard”.
Aaaanyway
I do think we could have package formats leveraging torrenting more though. It could make updates a bit harder to distribute quickly in theory but nothing fundamentally out of the realm of possibilities. Many distros even use torrents as their primary form of ISO distribution.
I was thinking mostly of iso images I guess. You are talking about package updates.
First, fair point.
That said, for package updates, are there not Alpine mirrors? You do not need much bandwidth to feed out to the mirrors.
But I agree that, ultimately, they are going to have to find a home for the package repos if they want to directly feed their install base.
As for “the other costs”, those do not seem to have anything to do with their hosting going away.