[Hamara-devel] discussion about decreasing packaging overhead in debian

[Vikas Tara]

On 19/11/15 11:32, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Quoting Vikas Tara (2015-11-19 11:23:42)
>> On 18/11/15 17:59, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>>> Specifically for reducing metadata size, but I expect it to be one of
>>> the more difficult tasks and likely one of the less beneficial ones.
>> It's potentially beneficial for hamara users, we are hearing a lot
>> about problems that users have with downloading packages or
>> installation medium.
>>
>> Thinking about people with low bandwidth has to be part of our focus -
>> I appreciate other distro's don't need to have this as their focus if
>> they appeal to users with easy access to broadband / fiber etc.
> Please beware that the Debian list thread discussed above is about
> reducing *metadata*, not reducing package size in general. It affects
> only very _small_ packages - most packages in Debian won't be noticebly
> affected by optimizations in metadate size.
Cool - note to myself not to speed read!
>
> For deployment in areas with low bandwidth, what you should be looking
> at (and no doubt already do) iscarefully choosing lesser bloated set of
> packages to install.
Yeah - am on that
>
>
>> We will be looking to make hamara-sugam as lean as possible and
>> encourage people to create apt repos on portable media to help each
>> other keep up to date.
> Custom APT repos has a high risk of spreading malware.
Am thinking of an apt repo that can be downloaded from us as a usb 
image. It should be signed with our keys so that hamara installations 
that update from such a medium, ought to complain if it's been tampered 
with.
>
> A safer option is to use a proxy - I use approx when in bandwidth
> limited - or even completely offline - environments.
Yeah - works too - but might require the user to have greater expertise?


Vik

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Founder - Hamara Linux
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