Russ Nelson's blog

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

posted at: 16:24 | path: /770 | permanent link to this entry