Re: Wheezy release: CDs are not big enough any more...
On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 2:56 AM, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
> Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:
>> Le Tue, May 15, 2012 at 01:54:53AM +0200, David Kalnischkies a écrit :
>
>>> And the fields defining a difference in versions are:
>>> Installed-Size, Depends, Pre-Depends, Conflicts, Breaks and Replaces.
>>> Differences in all other fields are ignored (as they are not guaranteed to
>>> be present - the status file e.g. misses the deb filesize as well as
>>> checksums for obvious reasons).
>
>> Installed-Size is not marked as mandatory or recommended in the Debian
>> policy. Do you think this is something to be corrected ?
>
>> http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-binarycontrolfiles
>
> Installed-Size is generated automatically by dpkg-buildpackage, so the
> only way that you'd get a package without it is by manually creating a
> package, which nearly no one does. So in practice it's always there,
> although it might not be a bad idea to make that clear in Policy.
It's not a problem per-se if the Installed-Size field isn't there,
it will just be ignored - not like a missing Package field APT will
complain big time about and is therefore mandatory.
Haven't checked but dpkg properly doesn't care at all for this field.
An archive creator extracts the size from the control file for the
Packages file, so it will usually have the same value (or none),
so this shouldn't generate different versions at all, but even if it
does the worst which can happen is that APT will schedule a
package for upgrade again and again.
The only missing/wrong bit of information will be the line in apt-get
output informing a user how much space will be used/freed by this
operation. It's a bit of a stretch to make a field "recommend" just
for this use, so i didn't consider that an issue, but i wouldn't
argue about it being added to the recommend set either.
The more interesting really pathetic issue is that this section doesn't
make non-empty Depends (and co) mandatory (advanced question: would
Recommends, Suggests and Enhances be it as well?), but if these
fields are missing if they shouldn't you are properly doing something
very wrong anyway and deserve some pain…
(a commit from 1999 commenting out Recommends and Suggests in
this code suggests that both could go away if different tools are used)
Best regards
David Kalnischkies
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