» Repository stripping

In order to reduce the download size of both the repository metadata (for yast2 and rpm-md) as well as lighten the traffic for mirrors, I've decided to both drop the src.rpms and the debuginfo RPMs. Those will still be available through HTTP/FTP browsing (or using the web interface), just not through package managers any more. The size reduction is pretty impressive. For my SUSE 10.0 repository, the whole directory goes from 4.6GB to 1.5GB (something the mirror admins will welcome), and for the repository metadata:

• yast2: 6.6MB to 3.8MB
• RPM-MD: 4.0MB to 2.1MB

That's 68% less for the whole directory, 43% less for yast2 metadata and 48% less for RPM-MD metadata. And I have repositories for 10.2, 10.1, 10.0, 9.3, 9.2 and 9.1 (didn't touch the discontinued 9.0 and 8.2 repos though). Short: it means that for everyone using my repository (with yast2, smart, yum, zypper, whatever), downloading the frequently updated repository metadata will be twice as fast. For the very few people who want to install the -debuginfo subpackages to have the debugging symbols or who want to grab the src.rpm files to rebuild, it means they'll have to do some HTTP/FTP browsing to download the files directly (most package managers don't support downloading the src.rpms anyway). Now don't ask me why I never thought of that before ;)