#428: cabal update uses too much bandwidth --------------------------------+------------------------------------------- Reporter: claus | Type: defect Status: new | Priority: normal Milestone: cabal-install-0.8 | Component: cabal-install tool Version: 1.6.0.1 | Severity: normal Keywords: | Difficulty: hard (< 1 day) Ghcversion: 6.8.3 | Platform: --------------------------------+------------------------------------------- Comment(by claus): I just found another reason why this is annoying: when using `--remote- repo`, cabal requires `update`, and that will always re-download the huge hackage index as well as the tiny index for the remote repo. Not to mention that we still have to re-download the huge index every time we want to install a newly updloaded package. The compressed index has now grown to over 2MB! Given that hackage only adds, almost never removes packages, why not have checkpoints of the index every week, and daily tarballs with just the added-since-checkpoint .cabal` files? Then cabal could download just the dailies, starting from the last downloaded local checkpoint. Very little additional technology - just untar the dailies on top of the last checkpoint (if the repo doesn't support dailies, fall back to the current scheme; for hackage, one could either have a server-side script selecting the dailies, or even let cabal do that client-side - the former being more efficient, the latter placing fewer burdens on non-hackage repo providers). -- Ticket URL: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/428#comment:6 Hackage http://haskell.org/cabal/ Hackage: Cabal and related projects