[Debian-med-packaging] Question about proper archive area for packages that require big data for operation

[Andreas Tille]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 11:48:05AM +0200, Laszlo Kajan wrote:
> 
> This email is to continue the discussion about free packages that depend on big (e.g. >400MB) free data outside 'main'.

In your practical case is this data say <500MB?  Are we talking about
compressed or uncompressed data (= >400MB on users harddisk or on all
Debian mirrors world-wide)?

We do actually have examples of >500MB binary packages:

udd at ullmann:/srv/mirrors/debian$ find . -type f -size +500M -name "*.deb"
./pool/main/f/freefoam/freefoam-dev-doc_0.1.0+dfsg-1_all.deb
./pool/main/libr/libreoffice/libreoffice-dbg_4.0.3~rc1-3_amd64.deb
./pool/main/libr/libreoffice/libreoffice-dbg_4.0.3~rc1-3_kfreebsd-amd64.deb
./pool/main/libr/libreoffice/libreoffice-dbg_4.0.3~rc1-2_amd64.deb
./pool/main/libr/libreoffice/libreoffice-dbg_4.0.3~rc1-2_kfreebsd-amd64.deb
./pool/main/n/ns3/ns3-doc_3.16+dfsg1-1_all.deb
./pool/main/n/ns3/ns3-doc_3.15+dfsg-1_all.deb
./pool/main/w/webkitgtk/libwebkit2gtk-3.0-0-dbg_1.11.91-1_amd64.deb
./pool/non-free/r/redeclipse-data/redeclipse-data_1.4-1_all.deb

Even if the topic should be clarified in general because we will
certainly have larger data sets than this in the future I could imagine
that packaging this very data in your case should not be the main
problem under the current circumstances as long there is no better
solution found.

I would even go that far that it might make sense to package these data
and upload it to demonstrate that we should *really* create a solution
for such cases if they will increase in the number and size of data
packages.

Kind regards

       Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de