Bug#137709: feature request: gzip /var/lib/apt/lists/*

[Richard Kettlewell <rjk@greenend.org.uk>]

Package: apt
Version: 0.5.4

This directory takes up a lot of space, but the packages files it
contains are highly compressible (about 75% can be saved on one of my
systems).  This may not be much of an issue on large modern machines
but I still have one system which is short of disk space.


Space may not be the only consideration.  I recall that when the idea
of compressing man pages originally came up on debian-devel, tests
showed that the compressed versions actually rendered faster even on a
486: the reduction in disk access required more than compensated for
the extra CPU used.

Of course this is a different application, so the results may differ,
but it could be worth investigating.

ttfn/rjk