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

[From: Niels Breet]

>Hi,
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 Why do we need to remove outdated packages?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>
>

I'm setting up a mirror of the diablo repository on a test machine to
see if this will work for us. It looks like we can adapt our current flow
to work with these scripts. It certainly looks interesting.

It seems a bit complicated to setup, but let's hope it is worth it. I'm
making good progress.

>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:
>

Let's try to do it 'The right way'.

>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.
>

I actually started to test this option but realised that this is not a
flexible solution.

Do you have experience with dak and can I pick your brain when I run into
setup problems? :)

>regards,
>guillem

--
Niels Breet
maemo.org webmaster