[aur-general] Moving some popular games from AUR to community

[Nathan Wayde]

On 15/08/10 17:13, Lauri Niskanen wrote:
>
> One possibility would be some kind of a delta encoding upgrade system.
> It doesn't help when it's the case of just binary executables, but when
> we have a game with lots of data files you don't probably need to update
> everytime all of those. Splitting packages is a solution for this issue,
> but a general synchronization based on single files would do the job in
> a modern way.
>
> In short: Why to compress a set of binary data files to a one huge package?
>

I'm hoping my insight is relevant to the discussion here. If not, sorry.

Anyway...

There's no need for any delta anything, as the current norm is to split 
the data from the games (I'd be surprised if A-G doesn't already do 
this) as can be seen (as a side effect) of the -any architecture wherein 
data files etc that are not executable are placed in a -data pkg. These 
pkgs usually contain the bulk of that large size, e.g a pkg that totals 
800MiB would have a -data part that is over 750MiB and as we all know 
when a pkg is updated to cause a pkgrel bump it's usually the 
executables that get updated so the -data pkg remains the same, no extra 
bandwidth need be wasted.

To put this into context the ARM, last time I checked was approx 6 
months in retention (IIRC) totalling less than 100GiB ofcourse this is 
all from memory so the numbers might be off but you get the general 
idea. The Arch repos as seen today: 2010/08/15 has a total of 11245 .pkg 
files in all 3 architecture groups(-i686, -x86_64 and -any) and the 
number doesn't change all that much day to day so put that into context 
of: these large games are typically released once or twice a year, we 
start to see that the bandwidth costs aren't that bad.

In my case I think it'd be nicer for all these games to be in A-G 
because it's then a little easier to find potential new games without 
needing to enter the pkg jungle you'd get with the other repos. I should 
admit that finding new games to play is the main reason I use A-G since 
I only play TC:E which is mostly a copy from a Windows install years ago 
and commercial games.