Re: Debian on the Sharp Zaurus/SL-5xxx
On Sun, 16 Jun 2002, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 16, 2002 at 06:10:10PM +0100, Miah Gregory wrote:
>
> > The size of the local package database is also a concern. Will any of the
> > planned changes to dpkg address the size of the database, to make it more
> > suitable for limited resource devices?
>
> For my test installation, /var/lib/dpkg is 2.8M of du usage. It is
> interesting to note that the total length of all of the files is actually
> only 1M, or close to 1/3 of that size, so half the space could easily be
> recovered by a filesystem capable of storing small files more efficiently
> than ext2. I have been planning to use jffs for other reasons, and I wonder
> if it has such a capability. reiserfs seems to do very well with small
> files, but I imagine that jffs will be better suited for the media.
How about using a single .ar file to store the files in info/? ar has a
header(overhead) size of 60 bytes per file. But, the problem with file tails
goes away(lots of maintainer scripts are well under 1k).
The problem with the above approach, is that running anything from this ar
requires extracting it. And flash does not have infinity right capability.
Using a temp ram drive might work, but that requires setting aside ram. Or we
could use ramfs(a 2.4 feature).
This could also be used to no longer need a single, large, status file, but
instead a bunch of separate ones.
To implmement the above info/ dir changes, would require providing a tool to
allow programatic access to the data stored therein. I have plans to do this,
but it'll be for dpkg 1.11. This is a feature debconf needs.
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