[Soc-coordination] Aptitude GTK Remote Host Management Proposal

[Daniel Burrows]

On Thu, Apr 02, 2009 at 08:58:20AM +0200, Marc Brockschmidt <marc at marcbrockschmidt.de> was heard to say:
> Daniel Burrows <dburrows at debian.org> writes:
> [remote apt]
> >   I think a more pragmatic, albeit also uglier, approach is to simply
> > lock the package database and cache on the remote side, then *copy* all
> > the apt state structures over the network, copying them back when you're
> > done (of course, you can use rsync for this instead).
> 
> While I have no idea about aptitudes internals, I wonder if it would be
> possible to, well, merge these two extremes (of doing RPC for everything
> aptitude does and simply copying all data) - with a bit of
> magic. If you ensure that you have the same Packages files on both
> hosts, you can do most of the work locally and just need the remote data
> to find out what's actually installed, which (I would guess, at least)
> greatly reduce the amount of data you would need to copy.

  I think that's a good idea.  In fact: you really could just skip
downloading Packages files to the remote hosts entirely and just push
them over rsync from the central host.  And you don't need to transfer
the package cache, since it's just built from the lists; just blow it
away when you send the lists and let apt recreate it.

  Daniel