[maemo-developers] Extras repository: clean out older versions.

[From: Guillem Jover]

Hi,

On Thu, 2008-07-24 at 16:26:02 +0200, ext Niels Breet wrote:
> Up until now we have always kept every version of a package that was
> uploaded to Extras. This wasn't considered a problem when we had only a
> few applications in the repository. But now we are getting more serious
> about Extras, we might want to consider cleaning up too.

Please!

> Why do we need to remove outdated packages?
> 
> We need to reindex the repository every once in a while and these extra
> files are taking up a lot of time to md5sum etc. Another side effect is
> that the Packages file gets very large when we list 10 times the same
> application but with a different version.
> 
> An example:
> http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/pool/diablo/free/a/advanced-backlight/
> 
> Does anybody know a good way to remove these old versions without causing
> dependency problems? I've searched for existing tools, but can't seem to
> find anything that is useful for this.

All this depends on what software are you using to handle the archive.
It would have to support some form of obsoleting, as you'd want to do
that continuously.

If it does not, the preferred option is changing the software, ideally
by switching to dak.

  <http://ftp-master.debian.org/git/dak.git>

If for whatever reason you don't want to switch but have the .changes
files around you could use mini-dak's obsolete scripts. But then you'll
be mixing two different archive software, which seems messy.

  <http://git.hadrons.org/?p=debian/mini-dak.git>

The other cheap options, which will also probably only lead to pain are:

Generating the Package index files and then filter them with something
like dctrl-tools (uniq-dctrl from dbug#387413), but this will not fix
your long runtimes, neither remove the dangling packages.

  $ sort-dctrl -k Package -k Version:rv $original_lists | uniq-dctrl

Or use “dpkg-scanpackages”, which will not output dupes by default,
but might take way longer as it does no caching at all.

regards,
guillem