Re: Sizes and Packages in dselect

[Raul Miller <moth@magenta.com>]

Ian Jackson:
   This is where the problem starts :-).  Obviously this can be done
   fairly easily if you're willing to have the user download a list of
   all the files included in every package, plus their sizes.  I don't
   think that's reasonable, though; even compressed, the Contents file
   for just the main part of the distribution is 120Kb.

On the other hand, it shouldn't be too hard to modify dpkg-deb to
compute summary information for each directory which is being
packaged.  (number of blocks, number of inodes directly in each
directory).  For packages which have some significant postinst
overhead, these estimates could be put in some file in the DEBIAN/
directory for the package.

I don't think the storage requirements for this kind of information
would be at all outrageous:

$ cd /var/lib/dpkg/info
$ cat *.list | wc
  21669   21669  669045
$ for x in *.list; do for y in `cat $x`; do dirname $y; done | sort |
uniq; done | wc
   3038    3038   44329
$ ls *.list | wc
    257     257    3007
$

Besides, the packing problem is a hard one to deal with -- so it's
very worthy of whatever automatic assistance we can provide.

-- 
Raul