On Fri, Oct 19, 2007 at 05:19:48PM -0500, Christopher Kampmeier wrote: > How does this approach relate to the situation where we will have a > transportable disk image format for IPS packages?
The fatness of a package in a repo can grow over time as more data is added to it -- new architectures, localizations, etc. A marshalled subset of the repo can be taken from the repo at any point in time with whatever contents are in there at that point. And, just as if you tried to install from the repo at that point, installing from the serialized form may not give you all the data that you might have gotten at a later point in time. > Will we only have fat packages in disk image form? You may have the option of pre-filtering the packages when you serialize them (no need to pass around sparc and x86 bits if you only care about x86). > If not, will a person handling the disk image form of a package readily > understand the general type of content contained in the disk image? Just as there will need to be some method to query the repo to find out if package P contains bits passing through filter F, there will need to be some method to query a serialized subset of it for the same information. > Does the representation of what is in a particular disk image form of an > IPS package depend on how the file is named? No -- I don't see any reason to specify a name for the subset, though people may develop conventions which are useful to them. Danek
