From: Chris Adams <cmadams(a)hiwaay.net>
The metadata starts in XML before being loaded into an SQLite DB file,
and the XML is in the repodata directory with the DB. However, both are
compressed, as they are large. For example, the current
updates/18/x86_64 XML is over 34M (5M gzip compressed), and the DB is
41M (9M bzip2 compressed). I'm guessing there are historical reasons
why different compression is used; both could be made noticeably smaller
with xz (XML to just over 3M, DB to 7M), but that's still a lot of data
to download (and there are also other metadata files that have to be
downloaded sometimes, especially the filelists.xml.gz, which is 10M gzip
compressed).
I was thinking there had been some xz integration recently. Maybe that
was with the delta rpm support. I don't follow that though since we have
a local mirror, there's not much point in rsycing, storing, etc. the
deltas.
I'm not sure when the XML is downloaded instead of (or in
addition to)
the DB, but it does appear to happen (I see one example in my mirror
server web logs this morning for example).
I've wondered about that too. I sure hope we didn't add the efficient
method on top of the inefficient method, rather than replace it.
--
John Florian