Package: lintian Severity: wishlist I think lintian could and should check for this. See attached the idea by Steve McIntyre (thanks). --Jeroen ----- Forwarded message from Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> ----- Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2004 01:52:57 +0000 From: Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org Subject: Packaging _still_ wasteful for many large packages Resent-From: debian-devel@lists.debian.org <sigh> I posted about this in April 2002 and this was clearly ignored by many people at the time. I posted a bug against evolution that was dropped to wishlist so as not to hold up the woody release and has since _also_ been ignored. We have a lot of packages which are _very_ wasteful in how they are packaged. Large amounts of data / translations / scripts do not belong in /usr/share in a binary package - they should be split out into common packages that all the arch-specific packages can depend on. Putting all this data into all the binary packages impacts on disk space and bandwidth, both for central servers and all the poor mirror admins aout there. I've written a trivial shell script (attached) that I've run against my local mirror to look for all large .deb files (>10MB) and check how much of each of those debs lives in /usr/share. Results at http://people.debian.org/~93sam/waste.txt shortly. I'm listing any non-all binary package that has > 1MB of stuff in /usr/share. There's potentially a couple of GB of waste here. There's also some worrying instances where two different arches have different sizes for the /usr/share component for the same version of the same package! I'm considering posting bugs against packages in the list asking for more sensible package splits. Comments? -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com "C++ ate my sanity" -- Jon Rabone ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Jeroen van Wolffelaar Jeroen@wolffelaar.nl (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357) http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl
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