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

[Carlos Carvalho]

Adam Conrad (adconrad at ubuntu.com) wrote on 8 June 2012 00:05:
 >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.

If you had not broken the excellent Debian repository structure I'd
use it. But the indices are broken so I can't :-(

 >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.

If you had kept the Debian repository I'd use a 21st century tool to
update. Sigh...

 >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.

As it is it's better removed as far as I'm concerned.

Can you put a file list generated by

TZ=UTC rsync -r --no-h path/to/repo > path/to/repo/FILELIST-master

That'd be really more useful than the archaic ls-lR.

 >Note, for those who aren't sure, if you're using any rsync
 >based mirroring solution (doesn't care about layout at all) or

Things get more complicated when you try to avoid disk seeks...