RFC: very large, redundant packages
Doesn't sound very appetizing, does it? But read on...
I am currently maintaining the user-mode-linux Debian packages. As new
users quickly discover, most of the interesting things that can be done with
UML require a root filesystem image to boot from. The UML home page[0]
provides some of these, and I wrote a simple tool[1] for building Debian
images noninteractively. Unfortunately, this cannot be done without manual
configuration, which is nontrivial for those new to UML.
Of course, the ultimate in convenience would be to have an image packaged in
Debian, so that it could be installed along with UML and immediately used.
However, this is probably not appropriate due to the large size of the data.
At 18MB (potato) to 25MB (current woody), with bzip2 compression, if
packaged these would rank in the top 25 largest packages in my i386
available file[2], right next to the 2.4 kernel source. Not something to be
taken lightly.
By some strange twist of fate, the woody images I'm building[3], when
bzip2'd, end up very close to the same size as the basedebs tarballs in
disks-i386/base-images-current. So, having a .deb wouldn't save any
download time, just the time required to figure out and use something like
rootstrap (which is currently nontrivial).
Clearly, there are a lot of reasons not to upload such packages to the main
archive. However, I have some ideas for other projects, still in the
thought stage, which will require a filesystem to be available. And there
is other, similar software in Debian (such as pbuilder) which has similar
requirements.
So, what are the opinions on whether it is useful to create such packages at
all? And if so, where could they be kept?
[0] http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/dl-sf.html
[1] http://packages.debian.org/rootstrap
[2]
28066930 hlatex-fonts-base
27794100 oskit
27028754 fgfs-base
25962650 toolchain-source
24588764 kernel-source-2.4.17-ia64
24090966 kernel-source-2.4.17-hppa
24011064 kernel-source-2.4.16-hppa
23875738 kernel-source-2.4.18
23635362 kernel-source-2.4.17
23597860 kernel-source-2.4.5-r4k-kn04
23495354 kernel-source-2.4.16
23012596 kernel-source-2.4.14
22856060 kernel-source-2.4.9-ia64
22710580 kernel-source-2.4.10
21709908 hlatex-fonts-extra
20026656 mercury
17451684 mit-scheme
17107242 pysol-cardsets
16247264 gap4-gdat
15704386 kernel-source-2.2.20
15661702 gimp-manual
15621256 egoboo-data
15561138 kernel-source-2.2.19
[3] http://people.debian.org/~mdz/uml/
--
- mdz
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