Zenaan Harkness wrote:
I've had the thought a few times that it could make sense to store a repo's files in a git hierarchy, rather than in a package pool. As in, raw files, with package description files which lookup the SHA for each file in the package, when a package is installed.
The package files are compressed tar archives, and because of this, they are binary files which alter radically between versions, and thus, would have horrible delta compression.
My primary thought is that repository size might be drastically reduced. Perhaps some md5sum numbers could be run to test this.
It would not be reduced by much and would have a tremendous overhead to access as a result, which the mirrors could never handle, and it would break backwards compatibility since http or ftp could no longer be used to fetch packages.