Re: Re: Inching towards new release...

On Sun, 19 Mar 2006, Andreas-Johann Ulvestad wrote:

> On Sun, 2006-03-19 at 06:15 -0800, Panu Matilainen wrote:
>> On Sun, 19 Mar 2006, Axel Thimm wrote:
>>> On Sun, Mar 19, 2006 at 03:06:25AM -0800, Panu Matilainen wrote:
>>> For a release officially supporting repo-md I think the filelists.xml
>>> support should be part of it, but release early, release often is
>>> always a better plan. How about tagging repo-md support as a preview
>>> feature if filelists.xml support doesn't make it?
>> Filelists.xml is a bit of a PITA in many ways: apt will probably have to
>> download them on each apt-get update "just in case" which is a hefty
>> download for very little use but dynamically downloading only when
>> needed like yum does might not be possible on apt, at least without
>> breaking Synaptic in the process.
>
> How about just matching the file size and last modified? Or - if one
> really wants to, store an MD5SUM of the current local version and
> compare it with MD5SUM on the remote server (requires another file in
> that directory, but I don't see any large problems with that regard).

That's what apt does automatically already, it wont redownload an 
unchanged file. However whenever the repository is updated the 
filelists.xml will change as well forcing a download if one is to use it 
for depsolving. The "problem" is that you'll end up frequently downloading 
a large file which is seldom needed but it IS needed occasionally.

 	- Panu -