Having dependency data separated from the link between version/package
and the dependency allows use to work on sharing the depdency data a bit
as it turns out that many dependencies are in fact duplicates. How many
are duplicates various heavily with the sources configured, but for a
single Debian release the ballpark is 2 duplicates for each dependency
already (e.g. libc6 counts 18410 dependencies, but only 45 unique). Add
more releases and the duplicates count only rises to get ~6 for 3
releases. For each architecture a user has configured which given the
shear number of dependencies amounts to MBs of duplication.
We can cut down on this number, but pay a heavy price for it: In my
many releases(3) + architectures(3) test we have a 10% (~ 0.5 sec)
increase in cache creationtime, but also 10% less cachesize (~ 10 MB).
Further work is needed to rip the whole benefits from this through, so
this is just the start.