Ansgar wrote: > could we drop the Priority field from most packages? Most packages use > "Priority: optional" and this is just noise in d/control (source > package). Tools should just assume "optional" when no other value is > set.
This seems like a great idea. People regularly note the overhead of each Debian package (as a standard argument made against having more packages), and this seems like a good way to reduce that overhead. Priority is definitely the *easiest* such change to make. This will primarily benefit individual package control files, and has relatively little impact on the compressed Packages index, since compression deals well with the repetition. For the 12M Packages.gz file in current sid, this would save ~22k. By contrast, eliminating the "MD5sum:" field (in favor of "SHA256:") would save 1.6M. And eliminating the one-line "Description:" (in favor of getting it along wiht the full Description from the translated files) would save 1.2M.
