How can we speed up rpm downloads?

[Caolan McNamara]

On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 17:54 +0200, drago01 wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 5:42 PM, Justin Conover
> <justin.conover at gmail.com> wrote:
>   At 34MB it still takes
> > time, but .deb is 50MB cheaper that the .rpm.
> 
> you are comparing two different packages (2.0.4 and 2.4)

There's a few other problems with a direct comparison of sizes because
they are two packages called "core" with somewhat differing content. The
Debian "core" package depends on a "common" package which is an
additional 27megs in size. The content of both of these is included in
the single Fedora "core" rpm. Additionally the default help content is
included in the Fedora "core" rpm, which is available in the deb
packages as help-en_US, which is another additional 11 megs. 

Additionally displaying help itself requires the use of the core writer
libraries to render the html help, in Debian this means that the
"writer" package is a dependency of help, and that's an additional 6megs
in size in its .deb. While in Fedora writer is split into the optional
bits called "writer" and the core required for use by help. Shrinking
the "writer" rpm by approx 3 megs, and inflating the "core" one by the
same.

To manually extract the various contents for side-by-side comparison you
can use

rpm2cpio something.rpm | cpio -ivd
vs
ar x something.rpm
tar xzf data.tar.gz

C.