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

[From: Marius Vollmer]

ext Alberto Mardegan <mardy at users.sourceforge.net> writes:

> It would be nice to have a server-side logic, that generates the Packages file 
> dynamically: the client gives a package name (and optionally a version), and the 
> web engine generates the Packages file which enables downloading of this file, 
> it's Depends:, Recommends:, Suggests:, and nothing else.
>
> I don't know much about APT, maybe something of this kind exists already?

It doesn't exist yet, but that is exactly the plan we have for
Harmattan.

The first little (quite untested) building block is "deb-exec".  The
apt-get in Harmattan now understands sources.list entries of the form

    deb-exec PROG

and it will run "PROG --packages" to get the Packages file (and "PROG
--get FILE" to eventually download a specific package file).

The idea is that PROG would use a little database of its own to
determine what should be downloaded.  This database is maintained by a
new 'discovery client' that uses whatever protocol it wants to
'discover' new interesting packages.

Code is here:

    http://maemo.gitorious.org/maemo-pkg/apt/commits/maemo

The current plan is to make a package of this that can be cleanly
installed on Fremantle next to Fremantle's native apt version.

The next building block will be to allow apt to temporarily use small
Packages files without having to recreate the whole binary cache.  This
would be used by the discovery client to efficiently check dependencies
etc for packages that apt doesn't yet know about.