On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 1:16 PM, Martin Pitt martin.pitt@ubuntu.com 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.
Just to clarify my meaning--- I expected to have a tarball per package, not one massive tarball for the whole system... the cost of maintaining the latter would certainly get very unpleasant for people.
[...]
However, dpkg does support hooks for things like that. If you want to do this, you might put a --post-invoke hook somewhere in /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/ ?
Interesting; I guess quite a lot of flexibility can be built on that... one question related to this: how does dpkg cope with hook scripts which effectively change a package's file list?
I can foresee problems if a post-unpack hook creates a file dpkg doesn't know about --- the tarball (presumably not in the package's file list) could silently be overwritten when installing another package.
Cheers ---Dave