Viral wrote:
Hi, This has been brought up many times before. The APT packages file is just too large to download everytime during an apt-get update.
What about splitting the Packages file up in its own directory so that each of the 7000 or so Package entries is its own file.
The package directory could be made available via a http or ftp server or whatever, and regular tools (e.g. wget) could be used to traverse the directory structure and only download files that have changed. It would mean that instead of always downloading one big file, there would be a few small files being downloaded but heaps more files being stat'ed to check if they are new, would havign everyone stat thousands of files create too much load on servers ?
It would waste some space on the server, 7000 package x 4kB block size is 28M, but bandwidth is probably a more precious resource.
It probably wouldnt be very complex to make a program that split, updated then rebuilt a packages files to retain compatablility with existing tools.
Glenn