large number of upgraded packages
I've noticed, since I upgraded to Woody and started reading the devel-changes
list that some times a package, which creates several .deb files (urk, bad
terminology), would have some small change made, which would only affect a
couple of the .deb files, leaving most of the others unchanged, but due to the
way the packaging works, all the new .deb files would be uploaded, and someone
doing an upgrade would download all the packages, most of which are
unnecessary. The biggest example of this is the XFree packages, where, say, a
change would be made in the fonts, but then new packages for everything X (twm,
xterm, xlibs, etc.) would be uploaded, which seems very wasteful to me, both in
terms of time, space, and bandwidth.
I can understand that it might be bad to just upload the changed files (I
haven't read the Debian policy, so I don't know if this would be against the
policy), but I was thinking that we might extend the .deb format to be able to
mark different versions as essentially equivalent. Then apt, instead of
downloading the new, unchanged files, would just bump up the version number of
the already-installed packages and everything ends up just fine. Or maybe
someone else can think up a better solution? Can we use checksums for this?
Hubert
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