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Re: Getting Rid of Unnecessary Files



[... please don't use mime on this list ...]

> I want to know if there is a way to clean out all of the
> copyright,copyleft,changelog, and other non-essential files in my Debian
> installation. i also want to clear out all of the non-English related
> stuff and the non-i386 stuff fron the tree. All of this takes up tons of
> space. These files are fine for learning purposes and for being able to
> establish contact with the various package maintainers. --however I have
> need of the disk space being taken up by these files. I have tried to
> remove them manually once before and many of them actually cause
> dependency faults if they are removed. Is it possible to remove them
> from a complete distribution tree of .deb files  and repackage the
> distribution as a totally customized distro strictly for my own personal
> use?

Did you try instead of removing the files making them 0 bytes?  So for
example if you have a list of files you don't need, you could do
something like

------------------------------------------------------------------------
#! /bin/sh

exec < file_list
while read f; do
 cat /dev/null > $f
done
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Then the files are still there, but take much less space.  This may be
enough to keep dpkg happy.

On a more general solution, for reasons of disk space saving, a switch
could be added to dpkg (and dselect and apt) not to put any of the
files in the /usr/doc hierarchy on the disk.  You could file this as a
wish-list item in the bug system if it is important to you.

HTH,
Eric

-- 
 E.L. Meijer (tgakem@chem.tue.nl)
 Eindhoven Univ. of Technology
 Lab. for Catalysis and Inorg. Chem. (SKA)


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