On the maemo-developers list, people have been arguing about the advantages of ipkg versus dpkg. Hopefully I can show rather than explain why we (the hh.org) folks prefer ipkg.
I have Debian 2.2 on a server and Familiar 6.2 on a handheld. Since we're talking about using either dpkg or ipkg on a jffs2 filesystem, all space consumption is given as a compressed tarball. Here is the space consumed by the package manager's overhead for installed packages and for available packages against ipkg and dpkg.
| packages | size | bytes/package | |
|---|---|---|---|
| ipkg total | 378K | ||
| ipkg available | 939 | 317K | 388 |
| ipkg installed | 147 | 61K | 415 |
| dpkg total | 10620K | ||
| dpkg available | 15272 | 8660K | 567 |
| dpkg installed | 301 | 1860K | 6180 |
Here's how I got these numbers:
- ipkg total is:
- tar cfz - /usr/lib/ipkg | wc -c
- ipkg available is:
- tar cfz - /usr/lib/ipkg/lists | wc -c
- ipkg packages installed is:
- ipkg status | grep ^Package: | wc -l
- ipkg available packages is:
- ipkg list | wc -l
- dpkg total is:
- tar cfz - /var/lib/dpkg | wc -c
- dpkg available is:
- tar cfz - /var/lib/dpkg/available* | wc -c
- dpkg packages installed is:
- grep '^Status: install ok installed' /var/lib/dpkg/status | wc -l
- dpkg available packages is:
- grep '^Status:' /var/lib/dpkg/status | wc -l
