debmirror 2.3 should be hitting the mirrors about now. Main change is that it will now use the available diffs to update Contents files, which should give a nice bandwidth reduction for users who mirror those.

With that the option --pdiff (for "package diff") no longer really covered its function, so I decided to change it to --diff.

There's also a fix for mirroring archives that don't have a Release file.

Question for users

The option --add-dir has been marked as deprecated (for quite some time now I suspect). I'm considering to remove it in the next release as I cannot see any use cases for it, but it's quite possible I'm missing something and there are still people using it. If you would like that option preserved, then please mail me at debmirror@packages.d.o with an explanation of why and how you use it.

Managing the size of a local mirror

The archive has grown a lot over the past Debian releases and keeping even a partial local mirror can require quite some disk space. Luckily debmirror offers quite a few options to tune what is mirrored.

My own mirror covers testing and unstable 'main' for 6 architectures (i386, amd64, armel, hppa, sparc and s390), no source, no D-I images. It uses only 61G. I say "only" as that's about 33GB less than it could have been without tuning. In other words, I'm saving a bit more than one third!

Here are the options I added to achieve this:

--exclude-deb-section='^debug$'
--exclude='/(xen-)?linux-[a-z]+-2\.6[.0-9]*-[-[:alnum:]]*(openvz|vserver|xen)[-[:alnum:]]*_'
--exclude='(k/kde|g/gnome|o/openoffice\.org).*/.*_(armel|hppa|s390)\.deb'
--exclude='(a/axiom/|d/debian-edu-doc/|e/ember(|-media)/|e/eclipse(/|-))'
--exclude='(e/erlang|g/(gcl(cvs)?|ghc6)/|l/llvm(/|-)|p/paraview/|o/openturns/)'
--exclude='(s/scalapack(-doc)?/|f/festvox-|g/gcc-snapshot/)'
--exclude='(/acl2-books_|/digikam-doc_|/fluid-soundfont-gm_|/deal.ii-doc_)'
--exclude='(/libxmpp4r-ruby-doc_|/lilypond-doc_|/qt4-doc_|/vtk-doc_)'
--exclude='/i18n/Translation-.*\.bz2' --include='/i18n/Translation-(nl|de)\.bz2'

And the explanation is:

• I rarely use debug packages and they are relatively big; if I do need one I'll download it manually from a remote mirror.
• I don't run vserver or xen kernels (and if I did I'd probably compile custom kernels anyway). I do want "regular" kernels because of D-I work.
• I doubt I'll ever want to install KDE, GNOME or OpenOffice on my armel, hppa or s390 boxes, but I do want them for the other three arches.

• Selected individual (mostly scientific) source packages that I doubt I'll ever use but use up significant disk space (and bandwidth when updated). These were found by a simple:

  du -s pool/main/*/* | sort -rn | head -n 50
  

• Selected individual huge binary packages (mostly documentation), found using:

  du -s pool/main/*/*/*.deb | sort -rn | head -n 50
  

• I'm only interested in Dutch and German translations of package descriptions. Well, actually I'm not even interested in those, but it's useful to have them for testing debmirror.

Obviously I have nothing against any of the packages that I exclude. It's just that I don't need them.