Community Sources and My Personalized Repo

[Splex]

K i dont really know how to word this question properly.. so bear with me. I have started to notice some packages in my installer that are doubling up on me, and i wanted to stop this, so i would not doubt delete the other sources i have, which currently are only the community sources, how do i know which of the community sources are currently in my personalized repo, and which ones are not?

Which packages at the repo.sc page are the community sources?

Any other tips?

[BigMoeW]

Well, this is the page showing the sources repo.sc tracks

http://www.touchtoolset.com/repo-sou...23-2008-a.html

The community sources are as follows:

BigBoss: sleepers.net/iphonerepo
Conceited Software: macminicolo.net/conceited/iphone/cache.plist
iPod Touch Fans: touchrepo.com/repo.xml
ModMyiFone.com: modmyifone.com/installer.xml
Ste Packaging: repo.smxy.org/iphone-apps/

By deleting the seperate sources, you're sure to stop the double-up, but if there is specific packages you want, then add to your personalized repo.

[TTS]

There's two approaches; one is like you're doing, which requires little bit more start up time (but is probably easier for getting the new apps in the long run), and the other method as BigMoew suggested, is to delete them and let us handle it here for you.

Unfortunately, there is no way at all for us to identify for you what your other sources are tracking, so I can't provide a smart feature to auto duct them out to prevent the doubling. What you must do is go through installer and find the doubles, then head over to Touch Toolset - View Your Packages and remove any duplicates that you're seeing.... this process might take some time, because if you used add all, you might have a LOT of things to remove.

Here's a small break down of benefits of using just repo source versus repo source plus community sources.

Repo Source Alone:
Pro:
VERY fast loading with only the packages that you use; my average is approximately 10 seconds or less.

Con:
You're always approximately, at most, 1 hour or so behind community sources, and you'd need to come over to manually add new packages

Community Sources PLUS Repo Source:
Pro:
Always have the latest version from community sources, you don't have to deal with 1 hour lag or manually adding new packages for stuff coming from the community sources.

Con:
Load time slightly longer. For 5 sources, assuming 1 second each -- I'd say that's a very kind estimation, realistically we'd be looking at maybe 3 seconds or more -- you're looking at 5 additional seconds load time that can "add up" over time. Of course, community sources will next to never be down, so you don't need to wait a minute in all cases, where as other crappy sources takes forever to load because they go down randomly.


In either cases; you should really only select the packages you need (add / remove all was added due to popular request, but I see it as a "bad practice"). That way it will reduce the amount of data you'd need to transfer, AND reduce the time your iPod Touch / iPhone requires to read the repository and categorize the packages for you.

[Splex]

sweet thanks.
yeah this repo is so nice with the refresh time.


does the repo.sc, without adding any additional packages, already have the community sources or does it contain nothing in the beginning?
because im gunna want all the community sources, and if i happened to miss a couple of them when adding packages, then i dont want to delete them from my sources list, therefore, i will unknowingly be missing those community sources.

[TTS]

When you sign up, you have no packages tracked, at all. You can add the "personalized repo" to your Installer, but you don't have anything on there, so its like adding an empty repo.

You can then go into the categories and add packages that interest you / you use; this will then add them to your repository, the addition is happening instanteniously here, no need to wait an hour delay or whatever (you would, however, need to hit refresh on Installer for Installer to fetch the updated source).

What I do personally is I don't even include community sources in my Installer (IE: see image on Touch Toolset - repo.sc main page), and I select the packages I want from the community sources. This way, I don't have to wait for five of them to load, and I only see what I want / need, plus a few junk on AppTapp official.

The alternative method is to keep community sources; this way you don't need to wait for repo source to update the community sources if they do update packages, and you automatically get the new packages as they become available. However, the down side is, you'd have to figure out what's on there and what's not when you're setting up repo source... simply add your packages, and remove the dupes would be fine (well, that and you get the extra packages you don't really need from them).

[Splex]

k sweet, do you by any chance know which packages are from the community sources?

[TTS]

Short answer? No.
Long answer? Well, maybe-ish.
Yes, I can look into the database to tell you which packages are currently coming from the community sources, but the problem is:
1) The list would be ridiculously long and hard to list; Ste's Packaging alone would have over 300 packages, BigBoss's Repo and Touch Repo (iPod Touch Fans' repo) will each add at least 70 more to that; rendering a list of easily over 400 or so packages, which will take up more space than each message can store (around 65kb of text, thanks to MySQL database; I can alter the datatype to allow more, but that'll create other not fun problems), so let's not go down that route.

2) The database is designed so that it works in such a way so that packages can come from multiple repositories, and as long as they're named the same, we only keep track of the latest version. This helps to prevent doubling up in your Installer, as well as help us save space and transfer. As such, if for example, a package is on both Touch Repo, and their own repo, and their own repo has the newer version, without manually looking at Touch Repo's XML, and figuring out what packages are there, I wouldn't be able to identify that package as a Touch Repo's package. Because the database will only tell me that it is coming from their own repo, and not Touch Repo. In the odd event that if we ever encounter problems where a malicious packages makes it to our service, we can very quickly identify which repo to remove to prevent further malicious packages from them, too.



If you still have community sources in your Installer, and you haven't added packages to your personalized repo OR if you haven't added your personalized repo, you can always look at each package's "Source" section (scroll a bit, at bottom of the screen) right before you click install > install / add to queue / cancel.