Linux and application installing

Alex Hudson fedora at alexhudson.com
Thu Sep 9 12:29:35 UTC 2010


On Thu, 2010-09-09 at 13:49 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le Jeu 9 septembre 2010 12:24, Alex Hudson a écrit :
> > What you really want is a font store which has functionality like this:
> >
> > 	http://code.google.com/webfonts/preview#font-family=Cantarell
> 
> What you do not realize is that this kind of preview works by having the
> complete font file downloaded by the browser in the background, in other words
> it is as resource intensive as just installing the font package and playing
> with the font locally. The only thing this kind of preview buys you is
> automatic font de-installation when you close the browser.

Well, we seem to be descending into technicalities now, but I did
realise that. I just don't think it matters. Let's examine the claim you
made that it is "as resource intensive as installing the font package".

.TTF fonts (as an example) just aren't very big. I tried a sample font
in my .fonts directory, it's 75K and five lines of varied "The quick
brown fox.." in PNG format comes out at 25K. If I gzip the ttf, it's
28K, and the png goes to 22K. So the data size is actually pretty close.
The RPM is 115K, including 94K of preview PDF (which also has the font
embedded into it.. even though we know it's on the system?!).

Let's look at the application time. Loading up the page I mentioned, it
takes less than two seconds to get the full font preview up (actually,
it's much faster than that, but I have no way of timing it, so let's be
conservative and call it five seconds). Download the font into .fonts is
pretty much instantaneous, presumably because it's already cached.

If I load up packagekit, the add/remove application opens in about the
same time. But now, I need to search and then click the checkbox, and
then apply. It takes eight seconds to "download repository information",
and then another five seconds to "resolve dependencies". Now I'm asked
for my root password. From entering that correctly, it then takes 25
seconds to complete the install. So this is pretty much 45-50 seconds,
even if we're trying to be quick. Presumably if you have RPM updates
outstanding as well, or PK is 'doing stuff', then the whole thing would
take longer too (this system was up-to-date).

So, I disagree it's "as resource intensive" as the RPM method. It's
fundamentally much faster than installing the font locally. Seriously,
just try it. It's not even in the same league.

But anyway, this is all really beside the point. The mechanics of how
this would work don't bother me as long as it works well. The Google
page, as technical as it is, is still leagues better than flicking
through screen shots. The user experience is what matters.

Cheers

Alex.


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