Re: data.debian.org -- requirements for packages

[Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org>]

On Fri, 01 Oct 2010 at 09:32:02 +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
> Something like:
> 
> Package: huge-dataset
> Depends: huge-dataset-base-2010-09-01, huge-dataset-patch-2010-09-10, huge-dataset-patch-2010-09-20, huge-dataset-patch-2010-09-30
> 
> And then have huge-dataset set up the data set and patch it as new
> versions are installed?

For what it's worth, I seriously considered doing this with openarena-data
to avoid having to upload 700M every time (350M source + 350M binary);
if I did this, I'd have made openarena 0.8.5 depend on both
openarena-data (>= 0.8.1, << 0.8.2) and openarena-data-0.8.5
(or openarena-data-patch (>> 0.8.5), or something). The "patching" process is
trivial for Quake 3-based games, because updates to the arch-independent
data just add new files and leave the old files untouched.

openarena-data 0.8.1 was incompatible with previous versions, so it starts
a new "epoch" and is suitable as a base package, but subsequent versions until
the next compatibility break (probably 0.9.0) are distributed as additional
PK3 (i.e. zip) files, whose contents override files with matching names in
older ones. We can't delete the "redundant" older copies of overridden files,
because they're part of the network-compatibility check, and will also still
be used if you connect to an older server, so the data packages will just keep
growing new files until the next compatibility break.

Any Quake 3-based game, and probably also games on various other engines, is
likely to have similar behaviour.

    S