Re: Cost of packages in disk space?

[Claudius Hubig <debian_1302@chubig.net>]

Dear Alois,

Alois Mahdal wrote:
> *   Do we want to count dependencies?  How deep (we don't want
>     to count libc* 10000 times, do we)?

Possible, but might be difficult.
 
> *   Do we want to separately address
>     *   `purge`able ~/.app-data?
>     *   /etc/app/settings?
>     *   /var/logs/app?

bleachbit can do some of that.

> *   Or are we looking for more sophisticated advice like "hey,
>     do you know that libhuge is required only by this
>     hardlyeverused-app"?  ("think about upgrade costs, dude!")

Usage is only available with popcon or so.
 
> However, are there tools that attempt to provide this kind of
> help?  Or at least answer the partial questions?  Or can
> apt*/dpkg do this?

A first start might be

$ dpkg-query -W -f='${Installed-Size} ${binary:Package}\n' | sort -n

Then, you can create a little abomination as follows:

$ for i in $(dpkg-query -W -f='${Installed-Size} ${binary:Package}\n' | sort -n | tail -n 50 | cut -d " " -f 2); do
    if [ $( dpkg-query -W -f='${Status} ${binary:Package}\n' $(apt-cache rdepends ${i}) 2>/dev/null | grep ^install | wc -l) -le 1 ]; then
      printf "%s\n" "${i}";
    fi;
  done

which can probably be greatly improved. Nevertheless, it prints leaf
packages with large installed sizes, for example, on my system:

tesseract-ocr-fra
libwine-gecko-1.4
mysql-server-5.5
skype
linux-headers-3.7.1.a2017.2
linux-headers-3.7.1.a2017.3
opera
inkscape
linux-source-3.7
adobereader-enu

Of course, it is not quite where you want to be, but it might be a
start?

Best,

Claudius
-- 
Please don’t CC me.