Re: Please test gzip -9n - related to dpkg with multiarch support
On Thu, Feb 09, 2012 at 03:34:28AM +0100, Guillem Jover wrote:
> Riku mentioned as an argument that this increases the data to download
> due to slightly bigger Packages files, but pdiffs were introduced
> exactly to fix that problem. And, as long as the packages do not get
> updated one should not get pdiff updates. And with the splitting of
> Description there's even less data to download now.
off-topic but often pdiffs don't really speed up apt-get update. Added
roundtrip time latency on pulling several small files slows down the
download unless you run update nightly.
But the more interesting slowdown is that the amount of packages is general
slows down apt operations in a rate that is around O(dependencies^2) (pure guess,
perhaps someone has better knowledge?). We do remember apt-get slowing down
to crawl on maemo platforms with much smaller repositories..
> Adding shared file support into dpkg, introduces additional uneeded
> complexity, that can never be taken out, and which seems clear to me
> should be dealt with at the package level instead.
However, if we add the complexity to dpkg, we don't need to add it to
all of the 1000+ multiarched packages. It would not be wise to do something
1000 times in packages which could be done once in dpkg. Even when doing it once
in dpkg is harder, it is still a lot less total work. Since Debian has chronic
lack of active hands working on packages, solutions that add the workload of
maintainers will just slow down the development of debian even further.
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