Saving Space (was:Re: [iPAQ] Getting Initimate and Famliar to play nice.)

>snip<
>Some form of compression for some types of files would help too.
>snip<

>I think most of the executables are already gzexe'd. Is there such a thing
>as bzexe? Is it possible to compress .glade files? xml tends to take up
>a lot of space but compresses very well owing to all the duplicate tag
>names. A lot of software reads plain text configuration files - could they
>be persuaded to read bzipped files instead, and would doing so cause
>other packages to break?

I would like the compression to be as transparent as possible. I wonder if
moving, say, the libs into a cramfs image would work?

Of course there is always e2compr:
http://www.netspace.net.au/~reiter/e2compr/

>There is certainly a lot that *could* be done to save space, but it would
>involve a *lot* of coordinated work. Is this the kind of thing that ought
to
>be in the distribution, or should it be left as 'Debianised' as possible?

Debian compatability should be maintained as much as possible. Using apt
to remove dependancies and keep track of things just makes too much sense.

>Fully agree with you about the use of links, but again, this may be better
>done by individuals as part of the 'tuning' process rather than in the
>packages themselves (unless the packages are installing multiple
>libraries in different places - which would be silly.) Even when it comes
>to hard-linking files to the Familiar files in the flash could cause
>complicated cross-distribution dependencies - upgrade to the latest
>Familiar might cause Intimate to break. If the packages were intact, they
>could just be re-installed to fix the problem, but if the packages
contained
>links, it would remain broken.

Some of the linking should be scriptable. Of course, if the upgrade
changes any file names or paths, the script probably goes out the window...

>Perhaps more discussion needs to be done on the wiki...

I thought we were ;-) Maybe some others would like to lend some expertise
and opinions here:

  http://www.handhelds.org:8080/z/wiki/IntimateDiscussion

>Dave.

Tom
Received on Thu Mar 29 08:04:19 2001