[maemo-users] Not enough memory

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext David Greaves wrote:
>> ext Jan Knutar wrote:
>>> Another nice feature would be if the application manager, or a web
>>> interface somewhere, could tell you beforehand how much space an app
>>> consumes on /...

It cannot, for several reasons.

The size for the package included to the binary package metadata
is determined by the Debian tools based on the space how much these
files take on the build file system which may be block based,
unlike UBIFS.  And more importantly, these tools don't or even
cannot take into account:
1. Where the files go, root or /home i.e. how much space package
    will take from which file system.
2. If it goes to a compressed file system (like root), what is
    the compressed size.  The compression level used when mounting
    the partition affects this too (which can be changed by root
    user).
3. Which of the installed files will be removed by apt-hooks on
    the device (e.g. docs...).  User can install also his own hooks.
4. Will the package itself do something that affects the space, like:
    - moving files from one partition to another
    - adding / generating new files
    - removing files

Even larger issue is with updates.  When updating a file that is
in use, file system cannot get rid of the old version of the file
until all of its users close the old file (which happens e.g. at
reboot).   And if the release image was compressed with different
compression level than what is used at run-time (may be lower for
performance reasons), even copying the same file in place may increase
disk usage.  Application manager doesn't have any reasonable way to
find out about this (and the comments above apply also to this
space).


>> That too would be useful.
> 
> Not as much as if the app manager didn't takes >10Mb of space for repo indexes

The files are fairly repeatable ASCII.  Rootfs compresses them pretty
well, you should check the lzo compressed size.


	- Eero