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



Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net> writes:

> 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.

How about making a Packages.small file with non essential fileds
removed. All long descriptions could be removed for example.

> 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.

It would be nice if Packages files would add new packages to the end
instead of alphabetically and if apt-get could use rsync to download
the Packages files (but not the debs). All the slow/never changing
packages would drift to the top and the start of Packages (or
Packages.gz) would remain the same and improve rsyncability.

MfG
        Goswin



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