Re: Temporary solution for changelog problem in binNMUs

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 03:16:57PM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
> The binNMU issue entails two ???sub-problems???. The first is the one
> introduced by different entries in binNMUs on multiple architectures.
> The other is the unmatched versions for possible out-of-step binNMU
> versions.

I acknowledge that I am coming late to the party. I dug into the
discussion referenced from your other mail, but had a hard time finding
specific arguments. This discussion appears to be a good candidate for
http://wiki.debian.org/Debate even though it is probably too late to
start that now.

> dpkg supports --control-show and --control-list (already in wheezy), which
> can be used for stuff like:
> 
>   $ dpkg-query --control-show dpkg changelog
> 
> for installed packages, for example. Or:
> 
>   $ dpkg-deb --info foo.deb changelog

Maybe someone can point me to previous discussion answering aspects of
the following questions?

1) Raphael Hertzog suggested[1] that metadata could be stored
   compressed. Is that implemented already? (As far as I can see it
   would be part of file_show, but isn't.) If not, that would cause
   an increase in installation size. I guess that a typical desktop
   system would grow by about 50MB.

   Note that the Emdebian crush policy requires copyright files to be
   compressed and changelogs to be absent.

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=681289#40

2) Some users may want to save disk space by elevating dpkg.cfg
   path-exclude=/usr/share/doc/*/changelog*
   path-exclude=/usr/share/doc/*/copyright
   This saves about 50MB on a desktop system. Is there a feature to
   systematically drop meta data? Being in the ball park of less than a
   percent of the installation size I am not sure whether this is worth
   the effort.

Helmut