Package: ftp.debian.org Severity: wishlist
I'd like to reopen the discussion about the pdiff format on the archive. Currently a pdiff is generated for each generation of the archive, which means that apt has to fetch 4 pdiffs per day it has to catch up. This means that for a 10 day interval, we have to fetch 40 pdiffs per index. Assuming amd64+i386 with Contents files and Sources enabled, we are looking at 2*(1+1+1)*40=6*40=240 files to fetch. This is clearly suboptimal, as it makes the log output unreadable, and causes severe slowdowns on high-latency or non-persistent connections. It might make sense to consider switching to merged pdiffs, which generate one Pdiff from each generation to the latest one. This can be done either by preserving old index files and creating pdiffs from them, or simply by concatenating the new pdiff to the old ones. A point against it could be increased space requirements and time to compress the pdiffs, but I'd welcome more discussion on that subject. -- debian developer - deb.li/jak | jak-linux.org - free software dev ubuntu core developer i speak de, en
