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Hi, On Tue, Jun 09, 2009 at 08:49:40 +0200, Cristian Morales Vega wrote:
What is the best way to package big/redistribution restricted files? Packman seems to use http://sourceforge.net/projects/autodownloader, but it has the problem that it isn't integrated with RPM. From an user POV you still get updates automatically, but you can't use rpm -V to check the installation integrity.
There is anything better? Any plan for repositories with metadata that point to BitTorrent packages? A patched rpmbuild that adds the RPM headers for unpackaged files that get downloaded in a %pre scriptlet? In the worst case... from a quick look I didn't saw anything, but there is any library to easily access to the RPM DB so I could patch autodownloader? addFile(package, file_path)?
You could package the big files somewhere else (separate build service instance), and have users subscribe to the repository. That way, the space would be used on a different system than ours and we wouldn't be bothered. You could also provide the large files (in unpackaged form) elsewhere, and have them downloaded via %post scriptlets. If there's mirroring, you could create metalinks and use aria2c for downloading, which takes care of content verification and mirror load balancing. (You could package the metalink into your buildservice package as well.)
...and, we have any official "limit" to the file size of a package? When it's a problem for mirrors?
Well, everything which contributes to size contributes to the problem. Which size are you talking about, roughly? If we know what you are up to, we can deal with it for instance by excluding files from ending up on the "normal" mirrors, and instead mirroring them elsewhere. Depending on the popularity, it'll be worthwhile to go this path. Popular content deserves to be mirrored, so widespread mirroring *might* make sense. In contrast, if the content is hardly used then it's good to make sure it won't end up on too many mirrors (resulting only in waste of space and bandwidth). Feel free to contact me with details. Thanks for your considerate post! Peter -- "WARNING: This bug is visible to non-employees. Please be respectful!" SUSE LINUX Products GmbH Research & Development