Bug#352912: general: Reduce network load using zip packaging and VFS

[Victor Porton <porton@ex-code.com>]

Package: general
Severity: wishlist

Here is my plan how to reduce Debian servers load and users Debian packages
download bandwidth:

1. Package in .zip (or a similar format) instead of .tar.{gz,bz2}

2. Implement ZIP filesystem as Linux kernel module.

3. Users could be then able to mount a .zip file from the Debian FTP server
and compile a package directly from the server. This would reduce download
I deem some about 50% compared with current downloading a source package
for compilation, because in this scheme only used files from the source
would be download (no downloading of documentation which is not needed for
compilation of a package, etc.)

Here there is however a complicated issue of what to do with Debian
patches.

Ideally we would also add Linux module for "patched file system" (on the
top of any filesystem, e.g. the above mentioned ZIP filesystem), which
would display files from an other FS with a given patch applied.

A simpler implementation would be to have TWO .zip files for each package
on Debian FTP site: unpatched .zip file (equivalent to .tar.{gz,bz2} as
currently used) and also patched .zip file, which could be usable for above
mentioned compilation directly from the FTP server without downloading.