[arch-dev-public] Large packages in repositories

[Thomas Bächler]

Am 17.08.2010 16:12, schrieb Dan McGee:
> Hey guys,
> 
> A package went in so big today that it made reporead blow up on my
> local database due to the installed size being > 2GB:
> http://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/i686/sage-mathematics/
> http://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/sage-mathematics/
> 
> File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/django/db/backends/postgresql_psycopg2/base.py",
> line 44, in execute
>     return self.cursor.execute(query, args)
> django.db.utils.DatabaseError: integer out of range

You should be able to fix that, right?

> I'm wondering if we need to be more careful when it comes to these big
> packages entering our repositories. This one is especially suspect as
> of its 71096 files (and 71094 in the other architecture), a ton of
> them are things like *.py, *.pyc, *.html, or *.png files. This is ripe
> for splitting into a -data package (or not including some of this
> junk, if it is that, at all).

We partly discussed this on aur-general, and making sage smaller is a
bit of a long-term task, if even possible. Anyway, dbscripts lack
support for having split packages with one package being
architecture-independent, so even splitting these data files away won't
be easy.

> tl;dr: I think we need some standards with these huge packages, and
> people need to be a lot more cognizant as to how big they are. We have
> lost more than one mirror due to complaints over needed space and
> stuff like this doesn't help.

If a mirror cannot cope with a few GB, then it should be dropped anyway.
Our repos will get bigger, one way or the other.

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