Re: PROPOSAL to sarge+1 - Split main in sub-repositories

[Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net>]

On 20-Aug-04, 16:22 (CDT), Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> wrote: 
> Daniel Ruoso wrote:
> > split main to the sections inside it, in a way to have separated
> > package files for each section, so I can choose which sections I
> > don't want at all, like kde and gnome, and maybe even games, or sound
> 
> Also, if you run up the numbers you will see that there are almost no 
> reasonable combinations of sections to leave out on anything but highly 
> specialized systems that will give you a space saving of say at least 
> 25%.

Actually, I'd been thinking about this, and I'd guess that any machine
that has problems with the large Packages file *probably* is not running
X. My thought was to generate a Packages.small that removed xlibs and
*everything* that depended on it, no matter what section. I've not run
the numbers to see if that is a substantial reduction, though.

There's two distinct issues, though. One is reducing the download size,
for machines on slow and/or expensive links. The other is reducing the
total size of the package database that dpkg et. al. have to deal with,
for machines that are slow or low-memory. It would be nice to have a
solution for both.

Steve

-- 
Steve Greenland
    The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
    system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
    world.       -- seen on the net