Re: Useless cruft in /var/lib/dpkg/status
On 31 Dec 2001, Paul Seelig wrote:
> Is it planned to get rid of package entries for purged packages in
> /var/lib/dpkg/status anytime in the future? I don't see the point for
> keeping entries which refer to packages which don't even exist
> anymore. In contrary it would probably(?) slightly speed up dpkg
> actions (could probably be neglected though) when this useless cruft
> could be removed. At least it wouldn't confuse users about the
> availability of non-existing packages.
Yes, there are plans to do this. However, not for dpkg 1.10(the latest in
cvs).
Those entries are actually used by dselect, so it knows when a package has
previously been available. dpkg has no use with such information, and yes, it
does slow it down(in addition to taking more memory).
My plan is to have dselect store it's intra-run state in another file, and not
overload status.
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