On Wed, 26 Oct 2005 21:32, Ian Bruce wrote:
> It seems that recently, the uncompressed version of the "Packages" file
> has disappeared from the "unstable" archive on the Debian network
> servers and all their mirrors.
>
> http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/binary-i386/
>
> On the other hand, the uncompressed file is still available for the
> "stable" and "testing" archives.
>
> http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/binary-i386/
> http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/binary-i386/
>
> What is the explanation for this decision? It makes it impossible to
> use rsync to update the packages list. (Perhaps this was actually the
> motivation for the change, but shouldn't it be up to the administrators
> of each mirror whether or not they want to allow rsync access?)
>
> Some related questions:
>
> -- what is the purpose of the "Packages.diff/" directory which has
> appeared in the "testing" and "unstable" archives? Is there some piece
> of software which makes use of this for updating the packages lists?
>
> -- is it possible that the "Packages.gz" files could be compressed
> using the gzip "--rsyncable" option? Or is this already the case?
>
> -- has there been any progress towards providing zsync access to the
> archives? It would seem that this would result in greatly reduced data
> traffic on the network servers, without increasing the computational
> load, as rsync does; I gather that this is the main objection to its
> use.
>
> Perhaps the answers to these questions are available in some obvious
> place; I looked everywhere that occurred to me, but didn't find
> anything.
I got caught with this too. Then I remembered a discussion some time back
to the effect that to download Packages was a waste of time and that
diffs would do the job.
I personally don't bother with the diffs, but use
buzip2 -fk .../dists/sid/main/binary-hurd-i386/packages.bz2
Phil.
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