On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, Josip Rodin wrote: >On Fri, Jan 22, 1999 at 01:22:56PM +0000, Russell Coker wrote: >> Would it be possible to have files such as Contents*.gz also provided in >> bzip2 >> format to reduce download times when using slow links? > >Good idea. And Packages files too. > >But that would need implementation in dselect, and will only work >if bzip2 is already installed. Bzip2 package is not in base IIRC, >and that would require a bit more changing, like adding another >180.6k to base_2.2.tgz. I'm sure that there are more problems...
I believe that eventually bzip2 support should be added to dselect and dpkg (I would like to have packages such as xbooks compressed by bzip2). I doubt that 180K would be added if it became base_2.2.tbz2, in fact it would probably be smaller. >Is there a way to manually download the Packages.bz2, unpack >it somewhere and make dselect use it? I remember something like >/var/lib/dpkg/methods/ftp/packages_something but I'm not sure. htget ftp://ftp.debian.org/.../Packages.bz2 | bzip2 -d > /var/state/apt/lists/ftp.debian.org.whatever Then you have to get apt to recognise the files, once APT is happy then everything will be fine. But the real solution is to change dselect and dpkg. -- I am in London and would like to meet any Linux users here. I plan to work in London for 3 - 6 months...
