Hints about future improvements
Hi everyone,
some days ago someone had a question about cutting a package into
parts. The answer was yes, and one of the reasons: it can decrease
the downloads which is espetially good if someone has modem...
I was thinking about this, and there's one thing which is not the
best it could be, I think: Let's see libc, and the packages that
are compiled from the same source, for example locales.
I see that libc6 changes so fast, which is good, 'cause it means
bugfixes are done fastly. But I think locales don't change, and it's
more than 2 MB. The same about the xfonts-(100|75)dpi. Can we
figure out a mechanism to solve this?
There could be a value in the control file like: Last-changed-version or
something similar. apt/dselect could decide from this wether it
needs to download this package or not.
If the package didn't change since the version already installed
the only thing dpkg should do (optionally) that it changes the cache
stating that already the latest version is installed. If there wasn't
installed a version which is the same as the last, it should download it.
The other thing is not as bad, but harder to do something with it.
Sometimes when a package is upgraded postinst asks wether
I want to upgrade the configfile. This is cool.
I see there's a new one, so I go to /etc, 'diff conf-file
conf-file.dpkg-new' and see if there's a real change. (Mostly not, maybe
there are some new comments/values, which do not really change the
program's behaveior) I think a thing like kernel's "make oldconfig"
would be cool to help people at this point. I don't really have an idea
how, because dpkg should keep a default of the installed conffiles or
have some information in the new ones to see which part is newer than
the installed one. Maybe somehow this information could be included
in the changelog.
Flocsy
PS: thinking about adopting the orphaned nfsroot package. Who should
I write to?
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