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

[From: Tor]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 08:19, Alberto Mardegan
<mardy at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> One more observation -- even though I have no concrete proposals on how to
> solve this: usually even developers don't need but a very few packages from
> extras-devel, yet the whole list is downloaded.
> 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.

That would break how apt works, for many of its features.
The simplest being that 'apt-cache search' wouldn't work.  It would
(as you suggest) be relatively easy to fix it so that apt-get install
<a package name that you know> works, but at that point you could as
well just move over to a web-based download function where the
'install' icon does it all for you. It'll work for simple installs
like that, but you lose what's known as 'the power of apt'.

-Tor