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List:       familiar
Subject:    [Familiar] ipkg and debs w/ removable media
From:       Tony Godshall <togo () of ! net>
Date:       2003-07-31 2:19:41
Message-ID: 20030731021941.GA29564 () sanity
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Hi, all.

I'm new to Familiar, and have installed Familiar 0.7 (tried
all three, settled on gpe) on my iPAQ 3765. 

These days, compact flash and hard drives are getting quite
reasonable and quite huge compared to the memory that comes
with the ipaq.  I got a 5GB drive for $169 last week (156X
the 32M internal memory!).  I'll fill it mostly with my CD 
collection in mp3 or ogg form, of course, but I'd like to take 
advantage of it to give me the best of the Familiar and 
Intimate worlds.  I want to be able to use my PDA as such, 
without heavy sleeve as I go through my normal life, but drop 
it in the sleeve when I need more.  I want to be able to install 
packages with full documentation (I guess this means .debs
rather than .ipks), but with the understanding that the docs 
aren't going to be accessable when the ipaq is not in the pcmcia 
sleeve.

I found the following very informative discussion between David A. 
Greene and Jeremy Hicks in the archives from a couple months back 
(I've trimmed it: the full thread starts here: 
    http://handhelds.org/hypermail/familiar/146/14630.html 
):

[DAG]
> > I've been reading up on ipkg today to learn the motivations
> > behind it, how it works, etc. I'm hoping all of you can
> > answer some questions.
> >
> > It appears that the primary problem of dpkg is the metadata
> > size. ... /var/lib/dpkg ...

[DH]
> Both the metadata and executable sizes are too large for the
> ipaqs with smaller flash configurations.

First, I'd like to make my /var/lib/dpkg a symlink to a
parallel dir on the hard drive.  Perhaps others would put 
theirs on a network drive (NFS or SMB or whatever).  The 
question is: is there any reason not to have /var/lib/dpkg 
someplace that goes away when not installing/removing software?

More from DAG and JH:

[DAG]
> > For me "real Debian" means being able to access the Debian
> > arm archives. If ipkg (or some other program) can do that
> > I
> > have no real need to install Intimate or some separate OS.
> > Given the fact that the Intimate mailing list appears to
> > be
> > dead, I consider this to be a very good thing.

[JH]
> ipkg can install .deb files. It does not currently suppress
> installation of any files, such as documentation, but if
> someone wanted
> to submit patch to that end ....
> 
> Or a wrapper around ipkg-unbuild and ipkg-build to
> automatically strip
> out overhead files from debian packages. ipkg-build and
> ipkg-unbuild
> are in ipkg-utils on cvs.handhelds.org.

[DAG]
> >>For me "real Debian" means being able to access the Debian
> >>arm archives. If ipkg (or some other program) can do that
> >>I
> >>have no real need to install Intimate or some separate OS.
> >>Given the fact that the Intimate mailing list appears to
> >>be
> >>dead, I consider this to be a very good thing.

[JH]
> > ipkg can install .deb files. It does not currently
> > suppress
> > installation of any files, such as documentation, but if
> > someone wanted
> > to submit patch to that end ....

[DAG]
> That seems like a useful thing to do. I'll start taking a
> look when I get back home. Do you have any thoughts about what this
> should look like? Perhaps a suppressions file somewhere in /etc?
> 
> It seems to me the key missing functionality is the ability to
> understand apt-style sources (i.e. /etc/apt/sources.list) and
> possibly parsing of a Debian Packages.gz file. I don't know
> what the ipkg equivalent looks like. Both seem like they
> would be fairly easy problems to solve. Of course Packages.gz can
> get rather large, which is a whole problem unto itself.
> 
> BTW, I love the dest options of ipkg. I wonder why dpkg/apt
> doesn't have that yet.

Second, rather than suppress installation of documentation 
and other non-critical files I'd like to see ipkg or dpkg 
install the immediate-use things in flash and the non-immediate 
things in the removable media. 
 
This would let me use the iPAQ naked (without thick heavy 
sleeve I mean) for PDA stuff, but then dig the sleeve
out of my backpack when I want to read a manpage or doc.
The built-in volume would just have a symlink for /share/doc
(and which other dirs?).

Perhaps I can just take DAG's code and generalize it, so
that the install-without-docs becomes the special case where 
doc-dest is /dev/null.

Like I said, I'm new to, so pointers to the ipkg source, 
cross-compile tools, etc. would be appreciated.  

Tony. 
 
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