Re: Debian on the Sharp Zaurus/SL-5xxx
On Sun, Jun 16, 2002 at 09:32:31PM +0200, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> Previously Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > I'd be interested to hear your opinions about whether they would indeed
> > be useful, and how difficult they would be to implement.
>
> Replying to to a html file is very inconvenient so if you want proper
> comments please post it as normal text to the debian-dpkg list.
To save you the trouble of cutting and pasting:
Exclude arbitrary filesets from being unpacked
This is already planned for a future dpkg release. Ideally, it would be
possible for binary packages themselves to specify some information about what
can be safely excluded.
Strip down status file
Exclusion of Description, Priority, Section, and possibly others, would save a
significant amount of space in the package database. Adam Heath: There are
plans to do this. If you look at status, there are empty package paragraphs.
dselect uses these, and they polute the dpkg runtime memory. We have plans to
remove these entries.
Optionally disable or compress available-old and status-old backups
Disk space and speed savings
Optionally unpack files in-place
Dangerous, but would provide significant space savings for upgrades. Might it
be better to remove (but not purge) and then install the new version? Doing
this frequently could provoke lurking bugs in maintainer scripts.
Exclusion of certain control files (?)
md5sums and shlibs could be excluded in most environments. templates also tends
to be quite large, but I don't know what can be done about that. Exclude
certain translations? It might be more effective to use a filesystem which can
effectively store many small files, as most of the cost seems to be from large
block sizes. Probably done most effectively with a separate tool.
Automated slicing of packages across different filesystems
For example, allow the user to say "for package X, place hierarchy Y at
location Z instead, and symlink Y -> Z". This would allow larger packages,
which might not even be able to be unpacked in internal storage, to gracefully
flow onto removable media. This probably belongs in a separate tool.
--
- mdz
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