Re: Feeping Creaturism vs. Disk Space

[Ian Jackson <iwj10@cus.cam.ac.uk>]

David H. Silber writes ("Feeping Creaturism vs. Disk Space"):
> Sounds contradictory, doesn't it?  Actually, I have three Debian systems.
> One (firefly) has a gigabyte drive.  One (aurora) has a 40 megabyte drive.
> What I would like to see in some future version of dpkg is the ability to
> block the installation of certain types of files on a per-system basis.  For
> example, on aurora I could have a file /etc/dpkg/config, containing:
> 	prevent man
> 	prevent info
> 	prevent examples

If I implement this, it would probably be in the form of shell
globbing patterns to apply to unpacked filenames, so you could say
something like
  unpack-ignore /usr/man/*
  unpack-ignore /usr/info/*
  unpack-ignore /usr/doc/examples/*
This is at once easier to do and more powerful and flexible.

I'm not sure how leaving out /usr/info/* would sit with install-info;
perhaps it could be encouraged to treat nonexistence quietly under
some circumstances.  This would probably have to be non-default (I
think that having the default be to produce a zero exit status for a
nonexistent file is wrong).

> The reason I bring this up now is the discussion on keeping extra dpkg
> information.  Some people are concerned about the amount of space that this
> information will occupy.  I can see both sides of the issue.  I really want
> the repair facility to be as feature-full as possible, because that might
> get me out of trouble some day.  On the other hand, I can't afford the extra
> space on aurora.  Perhaps my hypothetical aurora:/etc/dpkg/config would
> contain:
> 	prevent status

I'm certainly planning to allow dpkg's many proliferating options (and
dselect's, when I get around to implementing them) to be specified in
a file in /etc.  This is actually quite easy - I'll just arrange for
the file to be read as part of the ordinary option processing.

The real difficulty is how to fit them into dpkg's poor crowded
help screen :-).

I could do this feature - keeping permissions or checksums or
something - but I'm unsure as to whether it's worth it if the only
application is `repair'.

Ian.