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

[From: Marius Vollmer]

ext Tor <lists.th.arntsen at gmail.com> writes:

> It'll work for simple installs like that, but you lose what's known as
> 'the power of apt'.

Not necessarily.  You can keep the power of apt even if you only see a
subset of the whole distribution.  This is what happens when you have
only "main" in sources.list on a Debian system, and we want to do the
same, just on a much finer grained level.

The idea is that once you discover a package somehow (regrettably
without help from apt), that package plus all other packages that are
mentioned by it (recursively) become visible to apt.  Thus, what you see
is always a consistent subset of the whole distribution, and apt can do
its magic within it.

Or in other words, discovering packages via apt-cache search or via
debtags is a power of apt that we are willing to sacrifice if you gain
significant better scalability.

Users can of course always opt to let apt see the whole distribution.