Bug#352912: general: Reduce network load using zip packaging and VFS
First, I suggested .zip just for an example. There are other similar archivers with bigger compression ratio.
>> 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.)
>
>The documentation files are needed to build the .deb package, so it is
>no good to not download them.
Not always. For example, apache2 package is split into two packages: apache2 and apache2-doc (and also apache2-dev and several others). To Build apache2 binary package most of documentation files are not needed. In the case of apache2 downloading only needed files (e.g. using compilation directly from network filesystem) would be big traffic save.
>If there is a particular reason you have for wanting to build only
>partial packages, or in fact to build them at all unless you're a
>developer, please explain it. Since I can't think of any such reason
Reducing traffic.
>myself, I'm closing the bug, but that does not mean it can't be reopened
>if you have a good reason.
One more additional thought: We can make Debian server to serve files like apache2_2.0.55.zip/README and/or apache2_2.0.55-4.zip/README (patched) delivering to clients (compressed) entries from the .zip archive. (Which protocol to use? Not HTTP due too big overhead. Or maybe HTTP is OK with pipelining? At least HTTP well supports tranferring archived data. File modes can be specified by an extension HTTP header.)
Then clients would be able to mount these (source) archives as filesystems.
--
Victor Porton (porton@ex-code.com)
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