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Re: Reducing installed package size



Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> Just a opinion: Would it be possible to prevent dpkg writing these files
> to the system at all? Think of flash devices, where write cycles are
> expensive. 
> 

When it comes to flash devices, I don't think this is a big problem...
It's not like your going to be updating packages every 5 seconds... So
the number of writes that you'll be doing is not that much in the long term.
What might be a problem, is the extra space you'll be needing to install
things you don't need and that you're going to remove afterwards,
because you don't have space for them... This can be a problem.

Of course having the option in dpkg for not installing doc/man would be
neat, but I think the question here is: is it worth the trouble? Maybe,
maybe not...

> 
>>The proposal consists of two packages:
>>
>>* doc purge : removes stuff from /usr/share/doc
>>* man purge : removes stuff /usr/share/man (localepurge already removes
>>localized ones, but it might be interesting to remove everything)
>>
>>Any comments or ideas on this?
> 
> 
> I think this is reasonable, but I think this could break packages in
> subtle ways.  Is it mandated by policy that /usr/share/doc and
> /usr/share/man may be deleted by the local admin without breaking
> the 'essential functionality' of the package? (But honestly, I cannot
> give an example for this right now. Perhaps some symlinks to some file
> in /usr/share/doc/$package/examples)
> 

I don't know what the policy says, but from my experience I never had
problems because of (manually) removing doc or man files/dirs.
And from my point of view, I can't think of a good reason for having
symlinks (on /etc for example) to config files anywhere in
/usr/share/doc/<whatever>. So I think this shouldn't be a problem.

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