Hi, I'd like us to try out using LZ4 compressed index files in /var/lib/apt/lists for the next APT release series, starting in October, after the release of Ubuntu 17.10 "artful".
This is done by swapping the default for Acquire::gzipIndexes from false to true. On my system, this compresses /var/lib/apt/lists from 1.3 GB down to 241 MB, which is a lot of space. There are some packages broken with this, I just started a mass bug filing in Debian for that purpose. I don't have any equivalent to codesearch.d.n for Ubuntu, so I can't search there, but I hope there are not more packages here (especially since compressed indexes comes from Ubuntu in the first place). The Debian bugs are here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=de...@lists.debian.org;tag=apt-internals Some packages might have performance regressions: For example, iterating over packages in python-apt and then accessing their records causes random access to package files, which needs to be emulated by seeking to the beginning and starting decompression again. I'm sure we can fix this, however. If we notice too many issues with that, we can turn it off again before the release - this does not automatically decompress all the files again, though, so devel users still need to manually do that if they have issues. Opinions? -- Debian Developer - deb.li/jak | jak-linux.org - free software dev | Ubuntu Core Developer | When replying, only quote what is necessary, and write each reply directly below the part(s) it pertains to ('inline'). Thank you.