Re: Bug reporting script
On Sat, 12 Aug 1995, Richard Kettlewell wrote, regarding per-file
permissions info on files in packages:
> Ian, is there any likelihood that dpkg will store this kind of
> information in /var/lib/dpkg? It would work out as 100Kb or so if
> stored compactly but uncompressed, several times that in
> human-readable form. It should compress well.
>
> If this is felt to be too much, perhaps there could be an option which
> lets users control whether they want it (but what should the default
> be?)
>
> Anyone else have any opinions?
>
> Failing that, the best I can do is try to extract the information from
> the output of dpkg --contents on the .deb file, which isn't very
> satisfactory.
Predictibly, I suggest that file mode info, as well as file
md5sum and size info, be stored in a package overhead file
at package build time; similarly to what's done with the path
info which ends up in /var/lib/dpkg/*.list, but done at package
build time and not at package installation time. dpkg could
detect the presence of this package format extension at package
install time and handle both package formats appropriately.
On installation, this info could be carried forward into an
extended-format .list file, and dpkg and other dpkg-aware
programs which need it could use it if it's present there.
The .list file format extension might extend the single
field per line path info which is currently stored there to
path:mode:md5sum:size. That would probably double the sizes of
the .list files, if stored uncompressed, as is currently done.
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