[maemo-developers] Ovi Store disk space requirements miscalculations

[From: Martin Storsjö]

Hi Marius,

Thanks for the explanations!

On Wed, 21 Jul 2010, Marius Vollmer wrote:

> ext Martin Storsjö <martin at martin.st> writes:
> 
> > OPT folder value should be 80% of USR folder.
> 
> Taken literally, this means that the OPT folder is actually supposed to
> be smaller than the USR folder... :-)

Yes, this one felt dubious to say the least, but I was able to guess what 
the intent of the test was.

> If I remember right, Urho and me invented these numbers hand wavingly
> some time ago.  The idea back then was that if the OPT/USR ratio of a
> package is always larger than the OPT/USR ration of the actual
> partitions, then you can install as many packages as will fit into OPT
> without running out of USR.

While I agree with the general idea, this simple heuristic doesn't work 
well for small applications. Say a small application with a binary of 50 
KB in /opt - this one wouldn't be allowed to put the mandatory icons and 
.desktop launcher items in /usr as any other aplication, even if it is 
much smaller in total than many other apps.

So given that, I'd say a proper limit would be e.g. 10-20% of what goes 
into /opt, but at least 30 KB for all those mandatory things (icons, 
.desktop files). Or perhaps only a fixed limit, max 30-50 KB in /usr for 
all the mandatory system things that expect to find things there, and as 
much as is needed in /opt.

> However, I agree that directories should not be counted at all.  Then
> you will probably win by a even larger margin.
> 
> 
> To summarize: I don't know what they have calculated, but I think they
> should calculate the OPT/USR ratio and require it to be larger than 8.
> Furthermore, only actual files should be counted.  Filesystem specific
> effects like directories should be exluded.  This is a heuristic anyway
> and making it simpler and easier to reproduce in different environments
> is therefore more important than accurate simulation of what would
> happen on the device.
> 
> (If we want to simulate the device, we need to take UBIFS compression
> into account.)

Also, as Daniil pointed out, /usr/share/icons actually resides in /opt, so 
that should be taken into account, too.

And things under /usr/share/doc gets wiped regularly, so those files 
perhaps should be skipped from the calculation, too.

> > Also, is there any idea in trying to discuss these issues in Ovi Publish 
> > by commenting back? On Ovi/Symbian things, I've never ever seen a reviewer 
> > actually take my comments in account, so I don't think anybody ever reads 
> > the comments the submitter writes.
> 
> I'll try to ping the right people here.

Thanks, that's appreciated!

// Martin