[maemo-community] Periodic cleanup of Extras-Devel?

[From: Thomas Schmidt]

Hi,

Am Donnerstag, den 14.01.2010, 20:58 +0100 schrieb Niels Breet:
> Authors of a package should be able to remove their old packages
> themselves in an ideal world. I think we need to work towards that. It
> should at least be easier than mail Jeremiah or Niels.

I do not think that it would be a good idea to remove all versions of a
certain package from extras-devel automatically but i think it would be
a very good idea to at least automatically remove old versions from the
Package-Index (the packages itself could be kept on the maemo.org
servers), because a big Package index has a number of bad effects, which
are for example:

- long processing time when updating the index on the device, and as a
  immediate result, wasting battery power on every users device
- much space used in the rootfs
- unneccessary high traffic for the maemo.org mirrors

To be more specific (i did some tests in the last week):

The Packages file for extras-devel (Fremantle) is about 12 MByte
uncompressed, it contains over 3200 (Binary)Packages. The record holder
in terms of # of different versions in the index is dialcentral with
over 65 packages.

If the Index is filtered, so it only contains the "newest" version of
each package, the size goes down to about 3,2 MByte, so it is only about
25% of the current size, the number of binary packages goes down to just
a little over 1000.

If you are interested, i can provide the small python script i used to
filter the Package file.

The points above might be most interesing for extras-devel right now,
but it would be a good idea to also do the same with the package indexes
for extras-testing and extras, as their indexes will grow too over time.


Regards,
Thomas

-- 
Thomas Schmidt, Debian VDR Team
http://pkg-vdr-dvb.alioth.debian.org/
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