[maemo-developers] Icons are just a few bytes, right ?

[From: Attila Csipa]

Foreword: I know how deeply ingrained these things are. Just drawing attention 
so hopefully this gets resolved at least by the time a Harmattan device hits 
the shelves.

Extras-devel grew to massive proportions due to the flurry of activity by 
developers, which is good to see. This also brings some growing pains 
unfortunately. Currently just enabling testing/devel repos makes 25+MB of 
rootfs space disappear, and as package activity increases, this is just going 
to get worse. While I know maemo.org maintainers (or their tireless scripts) 
remove old packages from time to time, let's take a quick look what *exactly* 
eats this space and bandwidth.

Extras-devel Packages: 16.5MiB
Extras-devel Packages.gz: 3.5MiB

Okay, big, but there are 3000+ user packages. But, how about we strip the... 
icons ? A quick and dirty grep -v gives a rough:

Packages: 8.8MiB
Packages.gz: 1.8MiB

Conclusion: We have many duplicates, true, but roughly half of the bandwidth 
used for updating (and precious rootfs space !) are wasted on icons that are 
*never* *ever* going go be shown to the user.

Now, the ultimate solution would be to have a proper metadata repository, 
where we could keep, search and edit data like icons, bugtracker links, 
screenshots, forum links, source repo addresses, reviews, statistics, etc, but 
until that materializes, we should consider alternative methods to combat this 
problem. 

There are probably many better ways to do this, but a quick and dirty solution 
would be to remove the icon from the older version in the repo when a new 
version is pushed to the repo. The Application manager will show the latest 
package anyway (which *will* have an icon), and apt-get which would give you 
the older ones doesn't care about icons. Ideas, comments welcome. Thank you 
for your attention.

Regards,
Attila