Bug#37999: PROPOSED]: A pre-install required space checking mechanism for Debian packages

[Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl>]

Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Hi,
> >>"Joey" == Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net> writes:
> 
>  Joey> Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> 
>  Joey> Ok, that's a doable option, though it'll be a lot simpler to
>  Joey> just make a script that traverses the archive, examines every
>  Joey> .deb file, pulls the du infomation out of them and generates
>  Joey> the master file. That doesn't require modifying every package
>  Joey> and adding yet another file that must be uploaded
> 
>         Hmm. I guess that this can be yet another task performed by
>  dinstall, so one wouldn't even need to run the script over all
>  packages (one would just cache the result to regenerate the master
>  file later, I guess). 

Indeed, and it would be easier to implement this way.  We already have
the framework for generating several indices from the deb files (such
as md5sums), this would just be one more.

>         Hmm. This could get time consuming, though. We need to look at
>  _how_ time consuming it is.

The main time cost would be that of uncompressing the data.tar.gz element.
This need only be done for changed packages.  On my machine, creating the
tar index for a package takes about 1 second per megabyte (or 2 seconds
per megabyte if dpkg does it.)  This is an 120 BogoMIPS machine :-)

This index is already needed to generate the Contents files, by the way.
It should be possible to collect the information once and use it for both.

>  Joey> (and aren't byhand files installed by hand?)
> 
>         Well, the do not need to be. dinstall can handle it.

Then we shouldn't call them "byhand", but something else...

Richard Braakman