> Yes, it's redundant now, but the du's of all the packages might be > extracted and made available in some public place via http. That way
Of course, this extraction could be done with dpkg --fsys-tarfile | tar tvf - | perl -lane \ '@f=split("/",$F[5]); $ds{join("/",@f[0..$#f-1])} += $F[2];' \ -e 'END { for $i (sort keys ds) { print $ds{$i}," ",$i }};' This matches du -S, not normal du, and it is bytes, not blocks; for directory-inclusive summaries you could just tweek the END clause a little, or do the original sums using something like for $i (0..$#f-1) { $ds{join("/",@f[0..$i])} += $F[2]; } instead of just the single sum (I've tested the first version, but not this modification.) So generating the data for such a use can easily be done with no loss later on [assuming we have no sparse files in debs, but I think that is already true] which isn't the case for signed md5sums.