Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Apr 8, 2010 18:41 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: Applications and bundled libraries by wookey
Parent article: Applications and bundled libraries

I build pretty stripped down debian systems, and I don't see anywhere near the '40% of rootfs is package management' overhead that you describe. people who install fatter systems would see even less as much of the overhead is constant (there are a handful of files per package, but they are tiny compared to the rest of the package)

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Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Apr 9, 2010 13:20 UTC (Fri) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link] (1 responses)

That stat comes from the fact that the (emdebian-grip) rootfs for the product I am currently working on is about 60Mb unpacked, and after you do your first apt-get update at which point it is about 100Mb. Those numbers are from memory, but the point is that on a small system the overhead is significant. Debian's package list alone is 25Mb, and the package cache is another 13Mb on this box I have to hand. This desktop box has 60Mb of apt cache and package lists. Clearly 60Mb on a 4Gb system is not a big deal at all, and even on a 60Mb system we still find it useful enough that we choose to use it. We used to use ipkg which is enormously slimmer, and necessary if you don't have the storage to support apt/dpkg, but apt/dpkg do work a lot better when things get a little complex.

Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Apr 9, 2010 18:46 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

Ok, your systems is stripped down more than mine is :-)

if you don't do an apt-get clean after doing the update debian will keep the .deb files of the packages that you downloaded around (in /var/cache/apt/archives)

if you are wanting your product to update directly from debian's public servers then you need to plan to support the large package list (any way for them to split the package list is going to put _someone's_ critical package in an optional repository), but you can run your own repository and only put packages in it that you want to make available to your product. This will also save you time in the updates.

a minor point, I'll also point out that most of this space is in /var, which is not what most people would think of when you said it was in the rootfs