Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Free space wasting when handling binary files

[Simon Geusebroek]

Thank you a lot for having considered my problem.

I think that .deb files are already compressed as a .tar.gz archive,
so I do not think that changing or improving compression system would
(in my case) would change significantly the space required by the
repository.

The purpose of this repository is to handle revisions of a set of
live-CDs intended to be used by students of different branches of my
university, each one (computer science, chemistry, literary, etc., and
maybe later other universities) having their own "edition" of our
live-CD, including their own set of software.

The repository will have to handle all the files (including all the
.deb files, which needs about 3Go of data for each CD) needed to build
a complete live-CD of any of our editions. I cannot multiply by two
the space required for the repository, this would be too big.

A solution could be to handle the .deb files "manually" outside of the
repository, and to store in the repository only packages lists, but
this solution may be not very clean, and I would like to be sure that
there isn't any nicer way to tell Arch that each .deb files should be
recorded only once (the previous version being always available in the
repository…).

If someone has a better idea, I would be very grateful :),
I thank you a lot again,

Simon Geusebroek.