Re: Stop archive bloat: 47MB gmt-coast-full_19991001-1.deb

To: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@ualberta.ca>
Cc: Philippe Troin <phil@fifi.org>, debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Stop archive bloat: 47MB gmt-coast-full_19991001-1.deb
From: Sami Dalouche <debian@ifrance.com>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 23:17:24 +0200
Message-id: <[🔎] 19991020231724.B4094@pingoo.linhax.org>
In-reply-to: <[🔎] Pine.LNX.3.96.991018014209.31634A-100000@localhost>; from Jason Gunthorpe on Mon, Oct 18, 1999 at 01:43:42AM -0600
References: <[🔎] 87u2npkuc4.fsf@ceramic.fifi.org> <[🔎] Pine.LNX.3.96.991018014209.31634A-100000@localhost>

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 by the end of next year and if things continue in two
> release time we will be like 20G big and we won't even be able to mirror
> it ourselves!
> 
> We badly need to prune stuff and be more efficient.

I totally agree w/ this and would love to help a such project !
I think we should keep so many packages because this is one of the elements
which makes the debian distro better than the other but we shouldn't put all
the packages in the same place.
I think we should first make new sections and subsections and sort all of
the actually present packages into them. But we must really think a lot 
to these sections and make them as most significative as we can. 
for example, we shouldn't put all graphics related packages in the diretory
graphics but we should do a thing like this :

* media
	- graphics
		- viewer (e.g. electric eyes)
		- editors (e.g. Gimp)
		- libs
		- [...]
	- sound
		- editor
		- mixer
		- libs
		- [...]

We should allow symlinking packages into other sections if they can do many
things. For example, Imagemagick is an image editor but his concept makes
from him a great image viewer. So, I think we should put the .deb in 
media/graphics/editors and symlink it to media/graphics/viewer.

So, when we will a proper directory structure, we will be able to go to the
next step :
Determining which packages have the same goal as others. We can for example
see that there are many mixers available in the sound section. We should
determine the best [ or the prefered ] mixer for X and the best mixer for
the console. We should do the same for all packages in all sections. I know
there would be many conflicts, but when it's too deep, we could add both of the
packages in the main section. I think particulary to Apache vs Roxen. This
debate would never finish, so it means that both are the best and both of
them  must be added to the main section. In other words, main would mean
"THE BEST SOFTWARE" and by best, I mean the most powerful, not the
beginner's software. Inn would fit in main while the others news transport
system wouldn't.
I think a lot of clean in the editor section must be done too ! VI and (X)Emacs
should be the only intheractive editor present in main !

For the rest I've not more ideas on the moment, but I'm sure that we can do
a largely better distro !

BTW, I think that we should add another distro ! Yes, really ! Stable /
Unstable is too hard : You have the choice in having stable but very
out-dated software and in having updated software but which are too much
updated to be stable !
I think we should make another distro which would contain the stable version
of every software, not the cvs version or the version which was released 2
years ago !

-- 
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Reply to:

Follow-Ups:
- Re: Stop archive bloat: 47MB gmt-coast-full_19991001-1.deb
  - From: Goswin Brederlow <goswin.brederlow@student.uni-tuebingen.de>
- Re: Stop archive bloat: 47MB gmt-coast-full_19991001-1.deb
  - From: Fabien Ninoles <fabien@Nightbird.TZoNE.ORG>

References:
- Stop archive bloat: 47MB gmt-coast-full_19991001-1.deb
  - From: Philippe Troin <phil@fifi.org>
- Re: Stop archive bloat: 47MB gmt-coast-full_19991001-1.deb
  - From: Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@ualberta.ca>

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