Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2023 09:57:17 +0200
From: Timo Teras <timo.teras@iki.fi>
To: Kevin Daudt <kdaudt@alpinelinux.org>
Cc: "V.Krishn" <vkrishn4@gmail.com>, ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: suggesting feature, splitting pkgs repositories (part II)
Message-ID: <20230121095717.2f489602@onyx.my.domain>
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References: <3535e75e-f682-7435-a1f4-cd6d38180cfc@gmail.com>
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On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 20:14:33 +0000
Kevin Daudt <kdaudt@alpinelinux.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 11:08:31PM +0530, V.Krishn wrote:
> >=20
> > Would like to suggest moving -dbg pkgs in repositories into a
> > separate folder. eg.
> > main/aarch64.dbg or community/aarch64.dbg/

This is not possible with changing apk code.

> > OR
> > main.dbg/aarch64 or community.dbg/aarch64

This or some similar option like main-dbg, or dbg/main would be
possible without touch apk code.

> > Suggested change is desirable because:
> > 1. Users who would want to install -dbg pkgs are willing to do
> > debugging. They are mostly development oriented.

This would mean that new repositories need to be added if user wants to
use debug packages. Or perhaps adding some new apk feature to make
enablign the debug repos possible some other way.

> > 2. Mirrors may opt to ignore these .dbg folder, thereby saving some
> > disk space.

Understand. These can be fairly large at times. And it would be also
possible to configure close mirror without -dbg and another mirror with
the -dbg packages.

As an additional benefit the repository indexes without dbg packages
would be smaller - possibly helping embedded systems. And as mentioned
allow perhaps turning -dbg on by default (assuming we have enough disk
space on main mirrors).

> The question is if it is possible to move subpackages to a different
> repository as the origin package.

=46rom apk-tools side there is no problem. Having subpackages in a
separate repo is perfectly ok.

The complication comes from the building side. It would need special
logic to move the -dbg pacakges to different repository. And changes to
rebuild multiple indexes, and uploading to right place.

abuild also has assumptions that all generated packages are in same
destionation. This applies to detecting whether a rebuild is needed,
and on removing obsoleted packages.

All of the above should be doable, but might be non-trivial in some
cases.

I think the idea is good. But am not sure if/when someone would have
time to work on it. Would someone be willing to do the work if no one
objects for the change?

Timo