I performed a few little experiments, too. First, I tried encoding the various digests as base64 or base93, rather than hex. In each case, the file grew in size; base93 was the worst.
Eliminating all the headers (e.g., replacing Package: foo with simply foo) saved 3.2%. Replacing each one with an integer after its first occurrence (e.g., since the first line is "Packages:", every subsequent "Packages:" line starts "0:" instead) saved 1.7%. Using "\0" instead of ": " and "\n" saved 1.5%. Using ":" instead of ": " saved 1.8%. None of these do as much good as simply getting rid of one file hash. I know this has been talked about in the past, and as far as I recall the result, nobody could agree on a hash to drop, in light of both the expected future security of various hashes, as well as the hashes actually used by current versions of apt. (ideally you'd just go sha256, but iirc it's the md5sum that is used in practice, even today. but please find that thread, don't trust my summary) Jeff -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140714172629.ga6...@unpythonic.net
