Re: Sizes and Packages in dselect
On Wed, 4 Oct 1995, Ian Jackson wrote:
[...]
> > For each file in the files list, find the deepest existing directory
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> 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.
We've covered this ground before, several times. I didn't take
the time to try to dredge up past discussions, but did a quick
test. I don't have the current distribution handy at the
moment, but I do happen to have bits and pieces from 0.93r5.
The packages I have in the base directory total 3619624 bytes.
"dpkg --contents" gives a bit more verbose of a list than would
be needed for sizing. "dpkg --contents" on all these packages,
putting the output into separate files, produces a total of 213503
bytes of data. "gzip -9" on all those output files reduces that
to 25172 bytes of data. That's about 0.7% additional overhead.
Actually, it'd be less that that since the "dpkg --contents" output
is more verbose than would be needed. (my previous suggestion was
to include as part of package overhead a file with pathname, size,
and md5sum information for all files in the package -- with this
info being determined at package build time).
[...]
> I think it's probably better just to stick a single `Size' field in
> the Packages file.
Which wouldn't help in sizing per-partition usage.
Reply to: