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

[Laszlo Kajan]

Dear FTP Masters!

On 23/04/13 15:13, Benjamin Drung wrote:
[...]
> You can use xz for the source and binary package to reduce the size. The
> default compression level for xz reduces the size of the source tarball
> from 415 MB to 272 MB:
> 
> $ ls -1s --si metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar*
> 823M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar
> 381M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.bz2
> 415M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.gz
> 272M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.xz
> $ ls -1sh metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar*
> 784M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar
> 363M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.bz2
> 396M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.gz
> 259M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.xz

Following Benjamin's suggestion and the data.debian.org document [1], we have prepared a 'metastudent-data' arch:all package that is ~130MB (xz
compressed).
The package builds required architecture dependent databases in the postinst script. The purpose of this is to save space in the archive that
each architecture dependent version would take up.
The arch:all package is almost identical to the source package.

* Please comment on this solution. If you like it, we will upload it (targeting the 'main' area), and have 'metastudent' (also in main) depend
on it.

[1] http://ftp-master.debian.org/wiki/projects/data/

Thank you for commenting.

Best regards,
Laszlo