What happened to repo

[JoXo009]

A huge number of extensions is reported with today's date suddenly.

Seemingly a change of date without a change of content - is this change intended?

[Jason W]

What is happening is the same thing that had to be done to convert to squashfs, then to add time stamps to the files of those converted from cramfs, and then also to add correct permissions of /usr/local/tce.*. 

This is what I hope is the final repacking of extensions, this time was to use 4kb block size to take advantage of a substantial memory use reduction when using mounted mode.  The whole purpose of mounting extensions instead of copying to system is memory efficiency.  Memory use upon loading extensions is almost cut in half when this new block size is used.  It also seems that during runtime use of apps memory use has also been lessened, though that is hard to quantify in numbers.

Though by doing this there are new time stamps on the extensions in the repo, I think that the benefits are worth going ahead and making it effective on all extensions. 

[JoXo009]

So it's not my automatic update program going crazy -  there are really a great number of extensions which need to be updated to get the improvement working you described - correct?

Is this improvement step finished or better to wait 1-2 days to catch every update?  (ibiblio seems to be very busy now - most time stops working after 10-20 update requests)

Must be a bunch of work to manage that amount of files. Thanks for your great job.

[Jason W]

All existing extensions are being repacked as they were initially packed with the default 128kb block size.  For me it was just a matter of tweaking the script I have used to do the previous repacks.  They are uploading now, alphabetically it gramps-locale is in process as we speak. 

Cramfs extensions are now considered a bug as they don't support copy-to-system well on all extensions.  Same as the bad permissions of /usr/local/tce.installed.  So if any of those extensions exist in a tce directory I would certainly advise updating.

The transfer of extensions should finish by tomorrow morning.  This change is transparent to the user and does not affect functionality, and  I wasn't thinking of update functions or I would have announced this.  All previous extensions have been backed up as always just in case.

[Jason W]

Repo has been converted to new blocksize.  I will later update the size field of the info files as the extensions are a little larger.

[4-stroke]

Thank you Jason, for all the hard work!