Andrea Mennucc wrote:
hi first of all I redid the computazion using gzip cp /var/lib/apt/lists/*sarge_main_binary-i386_Packages /tmp/main_all cd /tmp egrep '^ |^Description|^Packa' main_all > main_descr egrep -v '^ |^Description' main_all > main_data ls -s main_* gzip -v main_* ls -s main_* result: 3044 main_all.gz 1220 main_data.gz 1672 main_descr.gz as you see we are saving 1824kb here (each time we do not downloadthe descriptions), or 152 kb, (downloading both)
Andrea, have you not heard of the (I forget who said it first) proposal to have a daily and weekly updated packages file?
The daily files only contain the packages that have changed the previous day up until the point the packages file was generated.
The weekly only contain the packages that have changed the previous week up until the point the packages file was generated.
You could have several weekly files, and even a monthly, but that's debatable.
I'd say this would save you much more bandwitdh than splitting out the descriptoin files, and it doesn't change the format, only includes fewer pakcages in the daily and weekly files. Of course splitting the descriptoins into seperate files can be combined with this, but the need to do so becomes much less pressing.
What do you guys think?