SEUL: Fat Packages

[George Bonser <grep@oriole.sbay.org>]

The way Debian does this is to have several binary directories. There is one
common directory called binary-all that contains things in the distribution
that are archatecture independant and several binary-<arch> directories.

If you look in stable/binary-i386/devel you will see that many of the packages
are symlinks to binary-all.

Once the system boots, it checks to see what archatecture it is running on and
points its installation accordingly.  This allows the distribution to be
smaller since you do not need a complete copy of common files for each arch AND
it allows the packages to be smaller.  Do you really want to have to download
all archs just to get yours?  Using symlinks in this manner makes the common
packages appear to be in all of the binary dirs even though they are not.  This
is how Debian can put the entire bin distribution on a sincle CD-ROM for all
archatectures. (The second CDROM is source code).



George Bonser 
If NT is the answer, you didn't understand the question. (NOTE: Stolen sig)
http://www.debian.org
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