Re: Packages.gz revamp

[Chris Lawrence <cnlawren@olemiss.edu>]

On Aug 10, Michael Urman wrote:
> Keeping in mind the two below mentions, a method that would slightly
> increase the total amount of needed space but generously decrease a
> daily upgrade individual download would be nice.  The obvious brainstorm
> level idea i would have is moving from:
> 
>   dists/unstable/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz
>   (which we'd still need to have available for older upgraders)
> 
> to a series of:
>   dists/unstable/main/binary-i386/admin/Packages.gz
>   dists/unstable/main/binary-i386/base/Packages.gz
>   ...
> 
> with one overarching:
>   dists/unstable/main/binary­i386/Timestamps.gz
> 
> which would contain lines of the format:
>   admin	    Aug  9 2000 06:45
>   base      Aug 10 2000 06:41
>   (or better yet a timestamp number instead of RFC822 style?)
> 
> The newer apt-get/dselect Update would know to fetch TimeStamps.gz and
> fetch the corresponding updated Packages.gz of the directories below.

Why is this needed?  apt-get will send an If-Modified-Since: header to
a HTTP server, so all it needs to do is hit each Packages file in turn...

(Probably a smarter approach is to rsync the uncompressed Packages
files; it's about the only thing rsync is good for with a compressed
archive like Debian's.)


Chris