On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 11:57 AM, Dave Martin <dave.martin@linaro.org> wrote:
On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 9:53 AM, Alexander Sack <asac@linaro.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 3:28 AM, Christian Robottom Reis <kiko@linaro.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi there!
>>
>>    I unpacked our minimal release image and ran an xdiskusage on it,
>> mostly to see what we're shipping -- and I was surprised to see that a
>> fourth of the image is actually apt package caches and lists.  Can we
>> put into the image generation script something to strip them out before
>> generating the image?
>
> if there are really .deb's shipped in the tarball then this is definitly
> waste and a bug.
>
> However, if its just the lists and pkg cache then I am not so convinced
> unless we say we
> remove apt (and dpkg) from our images (e.g. dont allow easy install/upgrade
> etc.).
>
> Those files would come back when running apt-get update etc., so the only
> thing we would win is smaller initial download bandwidth, while I think we
> are really after
> general/lasting disk foodprint savings.

We could remove these files, but I agree it may be a false
optimisation: the size of the release filesystem is no longer
representative of the steady-state size of the filesystem when it's in
use in this case.

ack. this was my line of thinking .... thanks for confirming.
 

Out of interest, does anyone know why dpkg/apt never migrated from the
"massive sequential text file" approach to something more
database-oriented?  I've often thought that the current system's
scalability has been under pressure for a long time, and that there is
potential for substantial improvements in footprint and performance -
though the Debian and Ubuntu communities would need to give their
support for such an approach, unless we wanted to switch to a
different packaging system.


CCed mvo who can probably give some background here. From what I understand it's a long standing wishlist bug with potential to break the world :-P


--

 - Alexander