Current squeeze main Packages.gz is 7 MB: http://ftp.ca.debian.org/debian/dists/squeeze/main/binary-i386/On Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:45:09 +0100 (CET) Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de> wrote: > I tried to find a clear advise how to reasonable format lists inside long > descriptions of packages. The only thing I know is that lines with two> leading spaces is considered verbose.Packages.gz is already 26Mb - I'd like to find ways to shorten the package descriptions, not lengthen it. :-(
debtags is not yet at a stage where this should be done (for one thing, Synaptic, for "example", does not support debtags). Even if it would be possible, I doubt this would help much.Can the long description be trimmed to only such data necessary to identify the package compared to similar packages? We have debtags for lots of other facets of a package description, maybe it is time that the long description itself is trimmed so that it does not repeat any information already encoded as debtags?
I don't understand the proposal as something affecting Packages's size significantly.> The rationale behind this is that with some > better standard formating some tools which display descriptions on web > pages might be enhanced to use <li>, <ol> and <dl> tags which finally > makes a better reading. Oh no, please don't let Packages.gz get to 40Mb or 50Mb or more. There has to be a limit somewhere.
The extended description needs to be available to APT, not only via packages.d.o. I seem to remember that Mandrake Linux (or some other RPM-based distribution) used two Packages-like files, a fat one about 5 times our Packages and a slim one about a fifth of Debian's Packages. I remember finding the slim index cool, but now that there's Packages.diff, I think that developing Mandrake-like Packages files and seeing the results in, perhaps, 2 years, would not benefit much to the kind of hardware Debian will run on by then.What about a way of having a really long, detailed, nicely formatted description on packages.debian.org but a much shorter, more basic version in the Packages.gz file?