Manoj Srivastava wrote: > Hmm. I guess that this can be yet another task performed by > dinstall, so one wouldn't even need to run the script over all > packages (one would just cache the result to regenerate the master > file later, I guess). > > Hmm. This could get time consuming, though. We need to look at > _how_ time consuming it is.
Not significantly more time consuming than unpacking a package. After all, all you need to do it get at the directory structure and filesizes, like you can get with tar tvzf. That does have to unpack the full tar file to complete though. And no I'm not advocating actually using the output of tar. > a) Backwards compatibility: Lots of things read the Packages files, > including humans. Of course Packages files are an extensible format. Throwing some encoded/compressed garbage in them in a field would not help readability, that's for sure. > c) Size checking can be optional. If I am not concerned about size > requirements, I can opt out of it -- and apt does not download the > size info. I think this flexibility is important Yes, that's good enough for me. -- see shy jo
