@iainlane
Copy link
Collaborator

Because there's no suite tracking, seedContentsData causes the output for all suites to be regenerated if there are any interesting packages at all, even if those haven't changed.

This is a problem because then every client will end up redownloading the output Components and icons files with every archive update even if nothing has changed. I'm a bit worried about deploying asgen with this unfixed.

Can we think of a way to avoid this happening? Like

  1. If a suite hasn't changed since we last ran, don't update it. (How do we know? Backend specific - for Debian, store a checksum of Packages?)
  2. Or, compare the output to the previous output by parsing it back in and then check if we have the same packages or if any of those have been reprocessed this time (for forget).
  3. Or, do suite tracking and then we can only regenerate suites if any packages in them have changed.

Any thoughts/ideas?