May be useful to do something that can merge all the manifests together into a single .json file then just download that, including removing duplicate info from each entry to for example display descriptions per translation like apt-cache, then it can be minified I guess, with an un-minified version if necessary.

[DrewNaylor]

Running apt-cache show lightning gave me this idea as well as what I've read about https://winget.run's API (that being, REST which is similar to json I think, but I thought a while ago it was directly json which is what I internalized), as apparently there's a "Description-en` field for packages. There's also so much extra duplicated stuff in the manifests that aren't necessarily needed, like how the package IDs are stored, as they're in each of the manifests for each package version. For some reason though, the copyright for the Chinese and English versions of 7-Zip 21.07 have different years, so perhaps copyright should also be stored per translation?

Not sure how to serve this though, as GitHub may not like it if a bunch of traffic is being taken up by me, and Linode may cost more money if too many users are downloading the cache updates. A potential easy solution would be to have a file that specifies the last update time, and to not download it unless the user says to do so or if the file isn't on the system already.

Generating the file can be done with a small computer (like something from Pine64, because Raspberry Pi recently hired a former cop and it was handled really poorly, and I don't support cops, both for personal reasons and for social/public reasons) at my house every 5 hours or so, giving it enough time to process and upload without having to tax a Linode server. Or if it wouldn't be too much, I could have a Linode server process the files so it wouldn't rely on my house having Internet and power/my small computer being online.

The only difference between my idea sorta based on what I've heard about https://winget.run's API when it was more directly json I think and the way apt-cache works is that it's human-readable instead of being a binary format.

[DrewNaylor]

Did some more research and found out about DreamCompute from DreamHost which provides VMs that you can just do stuff on, and they currently provide unlimited bandwidth usage for a really low price. Sounds nice, I don't know why they seem to be the only reasonably-priced place that has unlimited data usage for hosted servers.