On Wed, 4 Oct 1995, Ian Jackson wrote: [...] > > For each file in the files list, find the deepest existing directory > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > > 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.
We've covered this ground before, several times. I didn't take the time to try to dredge up past discussions, but did a quick test. I don't have the current distribution handy at the moment, but I do happen to have bits and pieces from 0.93r5. The packages I have in the base directory total 3619624 bytes. "dpkg --contents" gives a bit more verbose of a list than would be needed for sizing. "dpkg --contents" on all these packages, putting the output into separate files, produces a total of 213503 bytes of data. "gzip -9" on all those output files reduces that to 25172 bytes of data. That's about 0.7% additional overhead. Actually, it'd be less that that since the "dpkg --contents" output is more verbose than would be needed. (my previous suggestion was to include as part of package overhead a file with pathname, size, and md5sum information for all files in the package -- with this info being determined at package build time). [...] > I think it's probably better just to stick a single `Size' field in > the Packages file. Which wouldn't help in sizing per-partition usage.
