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.
For the project I implemented this it was good enough (i. e. saved us some 40 MB), and we don't care about the couple of bytes of extra directory overhead.
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/ ?
Martin