Re: "Freezing" non-free and contrib
On Mon, 16 Dec 1996, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> > One solution to this problem could be a directory ".everypackage" that is
> > not visible to the user but contains all packages.
>
> This would make it really painful to mirror only, say, frozen and
> unstable, but not stable. So it's not workable.
If we assume that the links are updated automatically in the new directory
tree (every other approach would be the hell for the maintainter), it
would we possible to create an actual file-list for each release which
could be used by the mirror-sites to fetch only certain files.
Such files could be used to mirror even with finer granularity: only
i386 from "frozen" and "unstable". (The advantage is that they would be
generated automatically.)
> If we don't have code names, when we start work on version 2.0, we
> will have to create a directory called 2.0. This will confuse people,
> since it is not clear whether 2.0 has been released or not.
How do you know from a codename like "bo" or "rex" if it's released or
not? I didn't refer to the links "stable" and "unstable", they are a must.
> Debian has now a large installed user base, and changes to the
> layout may not be done lightly. If we move all the files on the
> ftp site (as your proposal would require), then all mirrors will
> download a couple of gigabytes of data. This will kill many of
> them.
Moving all files on the ftp-sites now would be much to radical. Beside the
problems with the mirros we must guarantee a working release. It's just
not possible to delete "rex" now and move it's contents into
"releases/1.2" - it would break everything. My suggestions can only be
goals for the long-time run.
So I wouldn't mind if packages in .everypackage would be a link into "rex"
until it is superceeded by "1.3" (or whatever it will be called). (This
way we could avoid re-transferring megabytes of data.)
Cleaning up the directory structure step by step but being compatible is not
impossible.
-Winfried
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