I've noticed, since I upgraded to Woody and started reading the devel-changes list that some times a package, which creates several .deb files (urk, bad terminology), would have some small change made, which would only affect a couple of the .deb files, leaving most of the others unchanged, but due to the way the packaging works, all the new .deb files would be uploaded, and someone doing an upgrade would download all the packages, most of which are unnecessary. The biggest example of this is the XFree packages, where, say, a change would be made in the fonts, but then new packages for everything X (twm, xterm, xlibs, etc.) would be uploaded, which seems very wasteful to me, both in terms of time, space, and bandwidth.
I can understand that it might be bad to just upload the changed files (I haven't read the Debian policy, so I don't know if this would be against the policy), but I was thinking that we might extend the .deb format to be able to mark different versions as essentially equivalent. Then apt, instead of downloading the new, unchanged files, would just bump up the version number of the already-installed packages and everything ends up just fine. Or maybe someone else can think up a better solution? Can we use checksums for this? Hubert -- ____ | ----------------------------------------------------------- | / --+-- | / ___|___ Hubert Chan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | \ | _|_ | |__| |__|__| GCS/M d- s:- a-- C++ UL+(++++) P++ L++ E++ W++ N++ o? | | K? w--- O++ M- V- PS-- PE+++ Y+ PGP+ t+ 5 X R- tv+ b+ | / | \ DI++++ D G e++ h! !r !y | / | \ | | <><------------------ http://www.crosswinds.net/~hackerhue/ PGP/GnuPG fingerprint: 6CC5 822D 2E55 494C 81DD 6F2C 6518 54DF 71FD A37F Key can be found at http://www.crosswinds.net/~hackerhue/hackerhue.asc
