Paul Andreassen wrote: > > Hi, > > I've noticed that the .deb files are archives of tar.gz files. This isn't a > good format to maximise rsync's performance. If we changed to zip or > similar, in which individual files are compressed separately, rsync will > find more similarities in different versions and download faster. > > What do you think?
My thoughts: Mirrors (with rsync) are done relatively infrequently over relatively fast links (say once a day per mirror?). Installation (of complete files) is done very frequently (hundreds of times a day per mirror?) over possibly slow links. So the format should probably be optimised for the download of complete files. On the other hand, it the mirrors were able to translate from one format to another ... or perhaps an alternative to rsync could look inside the tar.gz files to improve performance? But then I may have no idea what I'm talking about. Richard
