RFC: Removal of ls-lR.gz files from Ubuntu mirrors

[Adam Conrad]

So, this is going to be short and sweet without a rediculous
amount of either preamble or annoying exposition.  In a nutshell,
we've been looking at ways to save time on our publisher cycles
on ftpmaster, and realised that it takes us 4-10 (depending on
I/O contention and blind luck) minutes to generate the ls-lR.gz
files that I'm *almost* sure no one actually uses.

When we first rolled out Launchpad/Soyuz as our replacement to
DAK, we didn't generate ls-lR.gz files, and we had exaclty one
person complain back then that their mirror tool from 1932[1]
required those files so, for compatibility with the DAK way of
doing things, and because our publisher cycles were 60 minutes
anyway and no one cared about speed, add them we did.

We're now many years past that, our publisher runs (usually) in
30 minutes or less, though sometimes runs over (and this would
be a decent step in fixing that), and it's probably safe to say
that the one user who desperately needed the ls-lR.gz files to
exist no longer cares.

This, then, is me asking our mirror world if anyone actually
has an opinion on the future of ls-lR.gz files, or if you really
don't care.

Note, for those who aren't sure, if you're using any rsync
based mirroring solution (doesn't care about layout at all) or
debmirror (operates intelligently on apt layouts, using Release
and Packages/Sources files), you don't care about ls-lR.gz.

... Adam Conrad

[1] This may be a slight exaggeration.