Hi,

My mirror disk recently filled up and I found SL (303, 304, 30x, 40
and 40rolling) is the second biggest "offender" at 54 GB.  This is
behind RH proper (all RHL and RHEL source) at 77 GB and in front of
Debian (all distributions, source + binary) at 40 GB.  Given that
Debian has just about everything under the sun packaged it seemed
strange that it is smaller.

Poking around RH and SL trees I think the bloat is due to keeping old
versions of updated packages around instead of replacing them.  For
exampl:

# cd fermi/linux/scientific/303/i386/errata/SL/RPMS
# ls -l xpdf*
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root      4178998 Oct 27 17:06 xpdf-2.02-9.3.i386.rpm
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root      4180782 Jan 14 01:01 xpdf-2.02-9.4.i386.rpm
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root      4180541 Jan 26 11:57 xpdf-2.02-9.5.i386.rpm
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root      4185413 Mar  4 19:09 xpdf-2.02-9.6.i386.rpm

I certinaly don't think the old versions are needed on the mirrors.
Are they needed at all?  If not can they please be removed or at least
moved to a subdir, say "obsolete/", that can then be avoided by the
mirrors?

BTW, I've also just made the same request on RH's mirror mailing list.

Thanks,
-Brett.