On Mon, Oct 18, 1999 at 01:43:42AM -0600, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On 18 Oct 1999, Philippe Troin wrote:
> > Do we really need a 47MB file that will be useful to maybe 10 people
> > using Debian (at most) ? We already fill 5+ CDs...
> On the same subject, the Debian archive is now 10.8G in size, at the
> current rate of growth a majority of the mirrors will likely stop
> mirroring non-i386 [...]
One thing we might be able to do is only release `extra' packages (and
contrib and non-free? data?) as source, and expect people to cope with
using `apt-get source -b' to build packages. This would require us to have
working source dependencies, though (which we have a policy ammendment
for, but I'm not sure if anything actually uses), and would get rid of
some of the niceties of having an all encompassing binary distribution.
Another possibility would be someone adding bzip2 support to dpkg et al,
and having .orig.tar.bz2's, and data.tar.bz2. (This actually doesn't look
like it'd be all /that/ difficult, either, just a matter of conditionally
using /usr/bin/bzip2 instead of /bin/gzip. Hmmm.)
Another idea might be to extend Apt to cope with non-Deb sources, so we
don't have to package everything ourselves. CPAN, CTAN, and the Gutenburg
project come to mind, eg. Having the LDP docs, the RFCs and kernel sources
`outsourced' might be reasonable too.
Another option that may be helpful might be to get a better doc policy,
so we don't have to include a dvi, ps, texinfo, and text version of
every second document in /usr/share/doc, or have multiple packages
with the same information (doc-linux-text, vs doc-linux-html, eg).
It might also be worth trimming some of the extraneous binaries some
of the larger worthwhile packages produce too. The various navigator
binaries take up 46MB or so in total too, eg.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.
``The thing is: trying to be too generic is EVIL. It's stupid, it
results in slower code, and it results in more bugs.''
-- Linus Torvalds
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