Re: Proposal: incremental release process (the package pool)

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

"James R. Van Zandt" <jrv@vanzandt.mv.com> writes:

> Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>  writes:
> >Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> >> This makes me think about dropping the symlinks completely.
> >> 
> >> So we can have a real, physical pool of any sort, and all
> >> distributions are simply a packages file with the relevant
> >> constellation.
> >
> >This makes it impossible for people with just a few GB of disk space,
> >but not 15, to mirror only the version of debian they are interested
> >in.
> 
> I think this is a fatal flaw.  Many mirror sites cannot handle the
> entire distribution (all architectures, all releases, and both binary
> and source).

It is simple to create the current release/architecture/freeness setup
by populating a directory tree with hard links from the package pool.

This takes very little extra disk space, and only consumes an inode
per directory, so is not a significant overhead.

The only disadvantage is that people that currently mirror stable and
unstable, and take advantage of the symlinks to save space will end up
with two copies of some files unless they user rsync.  I wouldn't call
that a show stopper.  If enough people whinge about it, we could have
yet another directory tree populated with symlinks where appropriate.

Cheers, Phil.