Re: Wheezy release: CDs are not big enough any more...
On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 12:46 AM, Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> wrote:
> On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 09:33:34PM +0200, Bálint Réczey wrote:
>> 2012/5/14, Marco d'Itri <md@linux.it>:
>> > Do we actually have an official debootstrap package for foreign systems?
>> > We could ship a static busybox with it and solve this and other issues.
>> > (I know, not all the world is a VAX, etc... But we cannot solve *every*
>> > problem.)
>> >
>> > If the problem is "foreign systems without xz" then we will never be
>> > able to use XZ for base.
>> How about switching to xz in the standard installer and providing an
>> alternate installer with recompressed packages using gzip/bz2?
>>
>> This would allow us to support most systems and save on bandwidth/mirror space.
>
> Bad idea, I'm afraid. Apt really dislikes seeing two packages with the same
> version but a different file size and checksum. You'd have to make sure
> that alternate installer never mixes its sources with regular packages.
Where "dislikes" means it will upgrade to the first version (defined by
sources.list order) with the highest pin (hint: the status file is the
last source and pinned to 100), which is the reason for overriding
self-build-with-same-version packages: These are usually not in a
repository and therefore the last version in the listing.
And the fields defining a difference in versions are:
Installed-Size, Depends, Pre-Depends, Conflicts, Breaks and Replaces.
Differences in all other fields are ignored (as they are not guaranteed to
be present - the status file e.g. misses the deb filesize as well as
checksums for obvious reasons).
So in essence: You have a good chance that gz and xz packages will have
the same install size and therefore be treated as equal (assuming that
xz packages will be unpacked and repacked as gzip). If packages are
rebuild to pack them in gzip the install-size might differ, in that
case the version from the first mentioned source will be installed.
Beside maybe wasting bandwidth in that case (for the sake of same version
for everyone in general) a pretty well defined behavior from my POV.
Best regards
David Kalnischkies
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