[maemo-developers] Considering /opt and MyDocs in your packages

[From: Marius Vollmer]

ext Graham Cobb <g+770 at cobb.uk.net> writes:

> Hmm.  Are there some objective criteria for what should go in opt?

Not really.  The proposed tool, maemo-optify, has a hard-coded, builtin
heuristic to select which files to move.  It is supposed to be a
fire-and-forget action: you add a simple call to maemo-optify to
debian/rules, and the heuristic does the right thing.

The current heuristic moves files that are larger than 2 kiB, and
directories that are larger than 2 kiB and are named like the package.
This is the output for ecoach, for example:

    $ maemo-optify-deb ecoach_1.53beta3_i386.deb
    usr/bin/ecoach -> opt/maemo/usr/bin/ecoach
    usr/share/ecoach -> opt/maemo/usr/share/ecoach
    usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon/ecoach.png -> \
      opt/maemo/usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/hildon/ecoach.png
    usr/share/pixmaps/ecoach -> opt/maemo/usr/share/pixmaps/ecoach
    ecoach: optified 4 entries, saving about 546 kB.

In light of the recent discussion, the 2 kiB threshold is maybe a bit
low.

Of course, we should add some way to control the heuristic of
maemo-optify, but I think it is important that it does something
reasonably by default.

> Can anyone suggest good tools for determining how much space my
> packages will be taking up, particularly by directory (e.g. I would
> like to see how much space they take up in /usr/bin, /usr/lib, etc.)?

You can extract it with 

    $ dpkg-deb -x package.deb 

and then investigate the ./package/ directory with du, etc.