Bug#60810: contents.gz package

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Justin Pryzby <justinpryzby@users.sourceforge.net> writes:

> Could we have a package which provides /usr/share/.../Contents.gz?
> Not sure that share/ is the right place.  And as Matt said, versioning
> is a potential problem.  But lintian (and others: apt-file) could
> depend on this package (say, debian-dist-contents).
>
> Justin

First of all how do you plan to update the testing package every day?
They should reflect the testing Contents, right?

You also have to release a new version every day. That is an 8MB deb
per arch and a source containing all 13 archs. That is 208MB updates
per day and suite. ~400MB for testing and unstable every day.

Ok, you can probably use the Contents-i386.gz and diffs for other
archs bringing it down to maybe 200MB a day. Then use a different
compression and maybe get it to 100Mb.

Still way way to much data on a daily basis.


I think the only sensible and simple thing to do is to provide a zsync
file for the Contents files (zsync can 'look into' gz to rsync just
the changes). Then every user can use a cron job to zsync the file to
his system on a daily, weekly, monthly, whatever basis. zsync uses the
http protocol so any http mirror carrying the Contents files will do
as source.

MfG
        Goswin