[GRLUG] One HUGE software repository

[Jeff DeFouw]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 10:45:58PM -0500, George (Skip) VerDuin wrote:
> I mentioned earlier that when I rebuilt my local system repeatedly for
> practice it looked to me like having a local mirror would save wear and
> tear on my DSL link and not irritate the debian guys.  The systems I
> built took a couple hrs for the basic system and a couple more for the
> desktop build.  I am now at 25GB and in the "i"s headed toward "z" after
> a day [16(+)hrs] connected by rsync to the MSU repository.  And that
> statistic is based on a long laundry list of exclusions from the full
> set of materials.

The repositories include many different versions of the same packages, 
sources, patch files, and other developer data that you're unlikely to 
use.  Mirroring all of that is going to waste a lot of time and space, 
or require a very complex exclusion list (again, time).

I recommend using an automatic package cache program such as apt-cacher 
or apt-proxy.  Just point your installers at one of those programs, and 
the software will take care of storing local copies of only the packages 
you've been using.  I know one of them also has offline functions.

-- 
Jeff DeFouw <jeffd at i2k.com>