Re: Upcoming FTPMaster meeting

[Philipp Kern <trash@philkern.de>]

On 2011-02-03, Joerg Jaspert <joerg@ganneff.de> wrote:
> * Leaf packages. that is, the possibility of having small packages in
>   the archive, without bloating the packages files as a "full package"
>   would. Somehow, less information stored for them. Like only "Package",
>   "Installed-Size", "Version", "FileName", "Size", "Sha1Sum" and one new
>   "mainpackage:" which is simply the package name of the "full
>   package". maybe a one-line description entry, but thats it.
>
>   Tools like apt then take all the other missing information, including
>   the long desc, from the mainpackage, and voila we get the possibility
>   to have something like foo-config-blabla and foo-config-blubber
>   without much bloat. (this will need design work done now but we won't
>   be able to use it before wheezy or wheezy+1)

Which would mean stripping Depends and doing indirection.  What about,
instead, dropping two of the checksums and refering to the Description
in another file which is planned for translations of them anyway?
(I.e. refer by hash.)

Would that already help quite a bit?  The description and the hashsums
probably contain a tad more entropy than the other bits and could
already help quite a bit.

(But then you're of course still bloating one Package file per arch and
there's no compression to help here.)

Kind regards
Philipp Kern