On Sun, Mar 24, 2002 at 10:23:28PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > "Adam Majer" <adamm@galacticasoftware.com> writes: > > > This is NOT about _censorware_ or other crap like that. It about making > > the Packages file less than a gig. Why the hell do we even have 386 as > > a platform? or m64k? When you need tons of ram just to load Packages? > > Ah, that's a different problem. > > It was once said on Usenet: "we can't add that group, because rn can > only support N groups" (rn used a static array). > > But that was a bug in rn. It may well be that it's time for Debian to > think about how to split up the Packages file so it doesn't require > re-downloading the entire database on every update to it. > > Do you have suggestions about how to fix that problem? I was already thinking about splitting up the Package file, the reason was to make distribution creating easier. But it's also nice to speed up apt-get of course. :) Of course there will probably be a lot of issues about my idea because I haven't thought about it that much. The basic idea was to give every source package it's own package file, i.e. in every pool/main/f/foobar directory there will be a file having much of the data currently in the big Package file. The big package file would have only a few things. I was thinking about the pool directory (main/f/foobar), the version of the package(s) in that pool, the md5sum of the package file in the pool directory and the last time it was updated. Apt-get can then simple look at the date and/or md5sum to choose if the pool dir package file is downloaded. It could also be done lazy and only when apt-get actually needs the information it will be downloaded, probably this should be a configuration option. Any new ideas and constructive critics are welcome, it's just a simple thought of mine. :) Jeroen Dekkers -- Jabber supporter - http://www.jabber.org Jabber ID: jdekkers@jabber.org Debian GNU supporter - http://www.debian.org http://www.gnu.org IRC: jeroen@openprojects
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