Slightly OT: downloading Xcode

[Stephen Barncard]

Hi Graham,
This sounds quite futile for you on such an imperfect connection, and an
unfair situation created by Apple. I guess they expect all developers to
have fiber-to-the-home or live in glass corporate towers with <2 megabit
connections. Such code bloat surely could be reduced greatly by refactoring
by their wonderful code scientists, but I guess that's not efficient. I'll
bet that over 60% of that block is absolute bloat but that's the world
they've dealt us.

ADSL is an especially imperfect,  ancient tech using analog phone lines to
carry digital signals and very susceptible to interference and bad weather.
I struggled with it for years at my place in Sebastopol, even a connection
with two lines until I switched to a cable based system.
 It's all about the distance to the cabinet and then from there to the
central office. The local cabinet (which could be on a pole) could be
connected to a fiber optic line but if the POTS (plain old telephone
service) wires are old and stressed can be the culprit. And even the wires
from the cabinet to your house may not be a continuous run. There might be
branches of line that dead-ends that used to connect to someone else's
house.  A call to your telephone provider might make a big difference when
you tell them your problem - it may not be the internet provider's issue.

 Sometimes the telephone connection at your house itself could be the
reason why the speed varies so much. Moisture and humidity can contribute
to bad terminations - look for "green copper" at the screw terminals - a
sure sign of contamination and resistance. They are trying to send analog
signals at near radio frequencies and that's very critical.

Finally, telephone companies around the world are replacing old copper
lines with fiber optic lines all the way to the home. The price of copper
these days has made the old wire a resource and makes it possible for the
telephone providers to run fibre everywhere more economical and possible
due to the salvage of the previous copper wires - fiber lines are cheaper
per foot vs bandwidth and carry TV signals too. The bandwidth needed to be
a developer today isn't going to get any less and rural customers are going
to need this bandwidth as much as urban ones in the near future.

for now,
Is it possible for you to take a laptop to another town, perhaps a
cyber-cafe with a suitable connection? If the time it takes to download
longer than it takes to drive there, would that make sense?
Or perhaps a friend that is also a developer elsewhere in France that would
be kind enough to drop it on to a USB stick or drive you could send him?
Certainly there must be a fellow Live-coder in your country that could do
this?

Or am I being naive?

--
Stephen Barncard - Sebastopol Ca. USA -
mixstream.org


On Sat, Oct 3, 2020 at 1:12 AM Graham Samuel via use-livecode <
use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:

> This is a question for people having to use XCode to generate iOS apps. I
> find from responses on this list that I now need Xcode 15 to have a chance
> of generating for iOS 14. I would ask Apple this quesiton, but I doubt if I
> would get a meaningful answer:
>
> I'm working deep in the French countryside with an ADSL connection -
> although I have enough bandwidth to stream TV programs, really long files
> are hard to download. Downloading Xcode - which is reported to be an 8.12GB
> file - at a speed of between 300 and 750 KB/sec is a nightmare. If the
> download speed drops below some unspecified limit, the download stops and
> has to be resumed in Safari, but that's not the worst of it. If I leave the
> download overnight, having got say 4 out of 8 Gb loaded, when look at the
> download folder in the morning, it only contains 14 bytes, necessitating a
> complete reload! There isn't even anything in the Trash. What's that about,
> and is there any way I can simply accumulate the download bit by bit until
> it's all finished?
>
> If anyone has any hints, I’d be grateful. Otherwise it means spending some
> hours keep the download pot boiling and wrecking the rest of my day.
>
> Thanks
>
> Graham
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