Hello, For some months or even years, there have been Packages.bz2 files on many of the main Debian mirrors. However I have yet to find any documentation or configuration options to tell apt to download the Packages.bz2 files. The URL http://lists.debian.org/deity/2004/02/msg00146.html describes a patch to enable deb-bz2 and deb-src-bz2 lines in sources.list. The patch was to 0.5.22, so I don't even know if it'd apply cleanly now or how much modification would be required. The technique is probably the simplest to achieve my current objective of downloading Packages.bz2 files, yet it is logically ugly or at least not entirely comprehensive. It would also require a subsequent patch and a complete rebuild of the application for any other file formats. The sources.list should not be tied to compression format.
However, 5.5 years has passed since this wishlist item was added, and there was never a response posted. Even 5.5 years ago I was primarily using bzip2 for source files of several hundred MB uncompressed, with a Pentium 133 no MMX and 32MB of RAM. I think it is safe to say that after 6 years technology has progressed to the point where most people can run bzip2 on their hardware if they want to, and save nearly 1MB transfer over the gzip version of the Packages files. I think it is reasonable to provide a method to allow people to choose an arbitrary file extension and handler. PPMd often does better than bzip2, yet PPMd can require even more memory requirements. However, looking forward, either this or some other compression technology could conceivably be desirable. The proper solution would therefore be to provide for arbitrary file format (compressed or otherwise) and handlers, and isolate the decompression code from APT (configurable command lines for (de)compression programs), and place everything into user-space configuration files. Of course it would be reasonable to choose a backward compatible default of gzip. And also have the ability to specify multiple file types and order for preference, in case some disappear. But at least the solution would not leave the users tied down to an compression algorithm that is showing signs of age. If there is already a way to do this with the current apt-0.5.27, then I would request some documentation of that particular configuration. Leif
