You do not have to install all 14 cd's to debian work, you only have to install the first cd. In fact I user only two disks from the site, the recover and root, and install by internet. Red Hat need a lot of cd's too if you want to install all the softwares that debian has.
Eduardo On Sat, 11 Jan 2003 20:54:41 +0100 Christian Fasshauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello! > > I'm currently RedHat Linux user and have got to know GNU Debian Linux, > which seems to be much more powerful than RedHat. Perhaps I'll be a > Debian user soon. But unfortunality it is a very large distribution with > 14 CD's. That's why I have decided to do something for getting Debian > smaller. > You are currently using the tar archiver and gzip with the maximal > compression rate for creating the deb files. That's more efficient than > most of the packaging systems I've ever seen but I think there could be > done more to build the archives smaller. Tar puts a lot of unused > garbarge inside the output, which is well compressable, of course, but > there are ways to get it even smaller. Unfortunately, my suggestion > introduces a very new archive design which isn't backward compatible. > The first step of generation is to collect all users and groups of the > files due to involve. This stuff comes after the uncompressed section > size, so each group and user name will placed only one time in the > archive and each node has one word to identify user and group. To save > space, there are only 256 user/group entrys available for one archive > section. The next part is the fs structure with date/time informations, > attributs as well as the user and group byte and the entry name > themself. Each entry has a size of 13 bytes + entry name length or a > symlink path or device numbers for block or char nodes. It is not the > whole path defined for a new format just like in tar but only what is > minimally neccessary to describe the file structure. The new structure > supports even more node types than tar. Actually all available under > Linux. After all there comes the file contents. BZip2 compresses the > whole archive. At the beginning I thought to reach a much better > compression rate than before but gzip is not so bad as I thought. > However file - rich archives or large text documents may become a lot > smaller, especially the dev system or the kernel sources. (On my system > a archive with the new deb format, containing the dev tree is 63% > smaller than that, compressed with the current format) The process is > much slower especially the archive creation, but one advantage to the > current system is the content listing speed, which is a lot faster than > now. And there is no dependency to the tar tool anymore. > You will find an example solution attached, which demonstrates the > archive creation and extraction. For creation you need the additional > "a" - argument to enable the new format. > I have no idea if you want this kind of support - all I know about > debian is, there are a lot of rules and code changes needs much time to > get into the code - so I have stopped developing after my main minds > were working. But I think there could be done much with dpkg to get it > better. For example a diff package for the several kernel source > versions which inherits from one host package. This could provide a more > user friendly interface for the arch - kernel source - patches. Then the > user could get an extracted source tree in /usr/src/linux-xxxx. Another > thing could be to design a deb format which holds the source packages in > one file..... > > With kind reguards > Christian Fasshauer >
