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.

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.