Originally Posted by misterc

[off-topic]
w3mir
the site is pretty well structured & any GNU/Linux familiar user should easily find her/his way around.
personally i use openSUSE on my workstations so i simply used YaST2 to get the package (& dependencies)
(as a matter of fact, it happened the other way around... was looking for rsync GUIs & stuff when i came across w3mir & decided it might be worse a shot )
i created a base directory & a sub dir for each repository

Code:

~ # mkdir /mnt/k/maemo
~ # mkdir /mnt/k/maemo/extras
~ # mkdir /mnt/k/maemo/extras-devel
~ # mkdir /mnt/k/maemo/extras-testing

adding a .w3mirc file in each of those directories allows to pass w3mir a number of parameters / options;
personally i started with

Code:

Ignore: *_i386.deb

as i'm not interested in games, themes or the like i also Ignored any such dir with more then a few MBs and ended up with...

Code:

. # du -sm /mnt/k/mameo/*
1064    /mnt/k/mameo/extras
14325   /mnt/k/mameo/extras-devel
1831    /mnt/k/mameo/extras-testing
1949    /mnt/k/mameo/extrax+testing

by running following commands

Code:

~ # cd /mnt/k/mameo/{REPO}/pool/freemantle
/mnt/k/mameo/{REPO}/pool/freemantle # w3mir -t 0 -q -drr -r -q http://repository.maemo.org/{REPO}/pool/fremantle/

i'll refer you to w3mir's MAN...pages for the gritty details

extrax+testing is extras & extras-testing merged;
simply run the w3mir command with extras respectively extras-testing URL in /mnt/k/mameo/extrax+testing/pool/freemantle to get that (if a packet is already there, obviously, it won't copy it again)
this saves 900MBs from ~2800MBs
guess could do the same with extras+testing+devel and save anywhere close to 2.5GBs; considering devel is 14GB...

all those numbers are with attached /w3mirc file (had to add .txt for TMO to upload it...)
as i said, not interested in games, themes & the like (no offence to the folks who spent their time developing 'em...) thus merely an inspiration
the file can be named w3mirc.ini on win32

playing around with the URL: and FETCH: parameters it should be possible to download / update extras+testing (or even extras+testing+devel) with one run...
once an initial download is done, the refresh goes thru like a breeze only getting the new / changed packages

hth
[/off-topic]