Re: Large data packages in the archive

[Mark Eichin <eichin@thok.org>]

Ove Kaaven <ovek@arcticnet.no> writes:

> Joerg Jaspert skrev:
>>  - Packages in main need to be installable and not cause their (indirect)
>>    reverse build-depends to FTBFS in the absence of data.debian.org.
>>    If the data is necessary for the package to work and there is a small
>>    dataset (like 5 to 10 MB) that can be reasonably substituted for the
>>    complete data package, the smaller dataset should be included in
>>    main and the package then may depend on "foo-data | foo-data-small".
>
> Hmm. Would anything happen to the current fgfs-base package (200 MB
> compressed)? This *is* intended to be the minimum data necessary to
> start FlightGear. The "full" data set, for comparison, supposedly fits
> on 3 DVDs. (Obviously, so far I have not felt the urge to package
> that, the users can get that themselves if they want it...)

You'd have to break that 3-disk-set up into pieces anyway - I haven't
gotten around to cooking up a reliable bug report on it, but
apparently dpkg (as of etch) itself can't handle packages over 2G (a
coworker ran into this with some map data and it got fixed another
way.)

(I can certainly see reasons to not want such packages archived, but
that's not the only source of debs, after all...)