On Sat, 03 Sep 2011 11:48:28 +0200 Steffen Möller <steffen_moeller@gmx.de> wrote: > Hello, > > with more people using Debian on phones and SSDs, the size > of packages keeps being an issue. It's more than the packages themselves. It also includes the Packages file and there's a clear need to encourage maintainers to use more package splits. Emdebian has smaller packages and keeps the Packages file smaller by only providing a subset of all packages in Debian. There is a possible issue where Debian might consider splitting main by functionality as well as by freedom but Emdebian has tried that with our Component support and it proved too difficult to manage in the long term. Other issues include: 0: single binaries which need upstream support to split up 1: over zealous dependencies / recommends 2: package selection - maintainers / upstreams need encouragement to package smaller apps with smaller dependency chains *and leave them small* which leads on to: 3: resisting feature creep. This includes closing some bugs as wontfix when what is needed is another small tool instead of the existing tool becoming twice the size. > And some claim that there > would not be much difference of current distros to all the > overhead that Redmond brings. Depends if you can live without Xorg - not all graphics need libx11. > Are we monitoring any sudden in- or decrease in disk > space per package or "per tasksel" anywhere already? The closest we get is the DebianCD team. There are many other factors which affect whether any particular package is considered "too big". A small package with a nightmare dependency chain is as much of a problem as a big package which only depends on libc6. Small python apps (especially GUI ones), many perl packages, panel applets too - it's surprising how often a small package generates links into massive dependency chains. I try to gauge some of these problems by installing problematic packages in an empty pbuilder chroot - not the -dev package, the runtime, starting from only what is part of build-essential. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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