On 19 Feb 2001 at 20:29:59 +0000, Jan Vroonhof <jan.vroonhof(a)ntlworld.com&gt; wrote: Hmmmm.... you'd also lose the md5 checksum. On the other hand, maybe there's a seed of a good idea in here somewhere. The current package-index file contains information with varying volatility. I'd group it something like this: Very stable (changes less often than, say, once a year on average): standards-version, maintainer, distribution, priority, category, dump, description, provides, type Somewhat volatile (between the other two): requires Highly volatile (changes with every package release): version, author-version, date, build-date, filename, md5sum, size How about an approach like this? - Maintain a package-info file that contains everything that is not highly volatile in the current package-index file. On doing a list&install, first check whether this file has changed, and download a new copy if necessary. - Name the packages themselves like this: name-version-authorversion-md5sum-pkg.tar.gz. (That will make for very long filenames, but humans shouldn't be directly accessing these files anyway.) Then use a parser like the one in my previous message to pull out version, author-version, filename, md5sum, and size. Putting date and build-date in there too is probably overkill, but I'll let somebody else decide that. What do you think? -- Jerry James