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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