Ian Jackson:
This is where the problem starts :-). Obviously this can be done
fairly easily if you're willing to have the user download a list of
all the files included in every package, plus their sizes. I don't
think that's reasonable, though; even compressed, the Contents file
for just the main part of the distribution is 120Kb.
On the other hand, it shouldn't be too hard to modify dpkg-deb to
compute summary information for each directory which is being
packaged. (number of blocks, number of inodes directly in each
directory). For packages which have some significant postinst
overhead, these estimates could be put in some file in the DEBIAN/
directory for the package.
I don't think the storage requirements for this kind of information
would be at all outrageous:
$ cd /var/lib/dpkg/info
$ cat *.list | wc
21669 21669 669045
$ for x in *.list; do for y in `cat $x`; do dirname $y; done | sort |
uniq; done | wc
3038 3038 44329
$ ls *.list | wc
257 257 3007
$
Besides, the packing problem is a hard one to deal with -- so it's
very worthy of whatever automatic assistance we can provide.
--
Raul
