On Fri, Aug 06, 2010 at 02:16:00PM +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
Hello all,
Alexander Sack [2010-08-06 12:15 +0200]:
If we have to keep /usr/share/doc/ (for copyright notices and so on), maybe it would be feasible to replace each /usr/share/doc/<package>/ with a tarball? This would eliminate most of the overhead as well as making the actual data smaller. Since /usr/share/doc/ is not accessed often, and not accessed by many automated tools, this might not cause much disruption.
CCed Martin who probably has thought about this copyright/space dilemma while implementing the dpkg goody i mentioned above.
Replacing the /usr/share/doc/ contents with a tarball, and updating this with every package update is certainly not something dpkg itself should do behind your back IMHO (or even could). It would also mean quite a lot of overhead whenever you touch any package in the system.
By touch I think you mean install, upgrade or remove, and of these I guess upgrade is the more common case; do you think it is?
Would the overhead be significant even if the tarball wasn't compressed? I don't understand enough about tar's concatenate and delete performance to risk a guess.