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

[From: Tor]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 12:19, Marius Vollmer <marius.vollmer at nokia.com> wrote:
> 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.

That sounds good.

> 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.

Sounds like a reasonable compromise.

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

One thing I forgot to mention in the previous message.. /var/cache
should never have been on the root filesystem, it must be one of the
most obvious candidates for the eMMC as soon as that's feasible.

-Tor