Brainstorm ways to shrink RPM metadata about createrepo_c

[dralley]

@Conan-Kudo I know you had strong feelings on this a few years ago, what are your thoughts?

I know that lazy filelists downloading makes the subject less relevant for Fedora 40+, but if there's an obvious win here we should still take it.

[m-blaha]

According to fedora packaging guidlines, files outside of /usr/bin and /etc should not be used as requirements anyway, and files from /usr/bin and /etc are already part of the primary metadata. I'd be really happy if depsolving did not need filelists. Never. Actually, there are currently very few packages (in Fedora, not sure how the situation is in third party repos) that depends on such files, and lately issues have been filed for them to drop such dependencies.

My only occasional use-case for filelists is "Which package provides this file?" (dnf provides /this/file/i/need), and for this reason I would prefer filelists.xml contained all the files.

[Conan-Kudo]

Third party repos tend to rely on file dependencies more because RPM distributions do not agree on packaging conventions. Fedora packaging guidelines should be ignored from an upstream RPM stack perspective (createrepo_c, dnf, etc.).

[Conan-Kudo]

I know that lazy filelists downloading makes the subject less relevant for Fedora 40+, but if there's an obvious win here we should still take it.

Nobody has yet implemented lazy downloading. I've asked for this to be considered and provided a conceptual path to doing so, but nobody has responded to my comments about it.

[j-mracek]

I know that lazy filelists downloading makes the subject less relevant for Fedora 40+, but if there's an obvious win here we should still take it.

Nobody has yet implemented lazy downloading. I've asked for this to be considered and provided a conceptual path to doing so, but nobody has responded to my comments about it.

I've summarized information about implementation of lazy loading of filelists in rpm-software-management/dnf5#1053.