apt: add option to compress files in /var/lib/apt/lists

[Mark]

Hi,

This is a suggestion for the apt package management system.

The files in /var/lib/apt/lists seem to be uncompressed text files. On my system they occupy over 110MB of disk space.

Would it be possible to automatically compress those files as they are downloaded? That could reduce disk space used by about 80%. That's particularly important when disk space is scarce, e.g. if you have installed Lubuntu to a USB flash drive, or are using a netbook with 4GB SSD. Plus reducing the amount of data written helps to extend the life of SSDs and flash drives.

(If the list files are downloaded via HTTP, the web server might be compressing them using gzip/deflate type compression. In which case, apt could save the received compressed data as-is, instead of decompressing and recompressing it.)

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

That's there already with the Acquire::GzipIndexes option (and/or some other options). It's slow though.

[SIDDHARTH (dhar-75-ap)]

Though this is not a bug,i like this idea as it could save some diskspace. I once had 700 mb of database cache as I never knew that with every update i.e "sudo apt update",the database would get updated and sync and just dump the new one.Never ever the old and not needed would still exist as memory hog. Though now days I clean the cache aka "sudo apt clean" every week.

The process could be like apt first gets the new update,then as soon as it reaches 99% it compress the copy in a file named apt_[date:time].zip. Then it would perform any additional task if required. When every thing is over it would remove the uncompressed files(flat file).