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[Philip Taylor (Webmaster)]

Robin Fairbairns wrote:

 > sure, it removes bottlenecks and (to some extent) overloads, but i can't
 > see it as a panacea.

I am more optimistic : I see it as being "the CTAN of the future" ...
 >
 >> I envisage the main CTAN systems becoming "super-seeders",
 >
 > you don't see this ctan becoming a super-seeder, i'm afraid.  my traffic
 > for last month is in excess of 400gbytes higher than the running
 > average, and given that the department (thanks to the u. of cambridge's
 > insane accountancy practices) pays by the gbyte, i'm in no position to
 > add a service that might add still more to the traffic.

Is it not possible to justify it as an investment ? /If/ the idea takes
off, there would be a very significant reduction in load on the CTAN
core nodes, would there not ?
 >
 > (note that uktug had some ambition to support this traffic charge, but
 > they hadn't understood quite the extent of it.  the suggestion seems to
 > have become rather quiet.  and that was before this excitement...)

They're still very rich, I'm told :-)
 >
 >> and the whole TeX community then acting
 >> as secondary sources (i.e., what you download, you auto-
 >> matically make available to others for download).  It's
 >> a rather nice Utopia, don't you think ?!
 >
 > except for those who are on a contract where they pay for traffic, or on
 > a net connection that has monthly limits (i know several uk people who
 > are).

I don't think I envisaged universal participation, but given the number of
TeX users who are University-based, it seems to me that we might well
have a nucleus of some thousands of willing participants.

** P.