It seems that recently, the uncompressed version of the "Packages" file has disappeared from the "unstable" archive on the Debian network servers and all their mirrors.
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/binary-i386/ On the other hand, the uncompressed file is still available for the "stable" and "testing" archives. http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/binary-i386/ http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/binary-i386/ What is the explanation for this decision? It makes it impossible to use rsync to update the packages list. (Perhaps this was actually the motivation for the change, but shouldn't it be up to the administrators of each mirror whether or not they want to allow rsync access?) Some related questions: -- what is the purpose of the "Packages.diff/" directory which has appeared in the "testing" and "unstable" archives? Is there some piece of software which makes use of this for updating the packages lists? -- is it possible that the "Packages.gz" files could be compressed using the gzip "--rsyncable" option? Or is this already the case? -- has there been any progress towards providing zsync access to the archives? It would seem that this would result in greatly reduced data traffic on the network servers, without increasing the computational load, as rsync does; I gather that this is the main objection to its use. Perhaps the answers to these questions are available in some obvious place; I looked everywhere that occurred to me, but didn't find anything. -- Ian Bruce -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
