Re: split descriptions Re: PROPOSAL to sarge+1 - Split main in sub-repositories
On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 03:17:30PM +0200, Andrea Mennucc wrote:
> There is an HUGE save in downloads. Try the comparison as follows:
Only if you skip downloading descriptions; otherwise it is only a 4%
savings. You are also comparing bzip2 sizes, rather than gzip which is what
the tools currently use.
If you skipped downloading descriptions, then you would not have
descriptions for any new packages, and the ones that you have could be wrong
(some of them do contain version-specific data).
> ---
> We will save on hard disk.
> On 20august I tried to install Debian on a old notebook with 800MB
> memory and I failed; one reason was that I had 24196MB used
> by /var/lib/apt
You did not have 24 gigabytes of data in /var/lib/apt. You say that the
disk was only 800MB (I assume memory=disk above, otherwise it makes no
sense).
/var/lib/apt with sources from stable, proposed-updates, stable-security,
testing, unstable, experimental and more, plus binaries from unstable, is
only 30M.
> ---
> many times the description is just a standard part, talking about the
> package , plus a standard part, saying that this is the library of that
> package: so I propose a macro system such as follows
This is what general-purpose data compression does; there is no need to
invent a macro language.
I do not think that the marginal benefits of such a feature would justify
the greatly increased complexity. The fact is, Debian unstable only gets
new versions of packages once a day. A long time ago, I set up a cron job
which runs:
apt-get -qq update
apt-get -dqq dist-upgrade
During the time while I am asleep, and I don't even think about download
time. I highly recommend this approach to users who have limited bandwidth.
Don't waste your time sitting and watching apt download things.
--
- mdz
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