On Wed, 30 Sep 1998 00:23:56 -0400 (EDT)  Jim Wise wrote:

> On Wed, 30 Sep 1998, Simon Burge wrote:
> 
> >I think we'd still need an overall summary file of all packages with
> >similar information in my message (size and dependancies) - the
> >difficulty would be generating that.  Maybe this can easily be done by
> >looking at the +CONTENTS file of each binary package, but I don't know
> >much at all about the internals of binary packages and how dependancies
> >are handled to know what's possible and what's not.
> 
> I think the set contents file should only contain information that can
> be automagically gathered from each package's pkg/* files...

I think I disagree with you here.  From a sysinst point of view, I'd say
we need to know the total installed size of each package, and that isn't
available in the pkg/* files.

In an ideal world, I want to tell sysinst that I want packages A, B, C
and so on, on a disk with separate / (with 30% free space), /var (64MB
in size), /usr (with 50% free space) and the rest of the disk in /data,
and come back however long later with a full system.  Shorter term, just
selecting the packages you want and sysinst telling you how big your
desired partition layout is (with a granularity of /, /usr and /var) and
manually filling in the partition sizes is a definite goal.

With the work going in with an MI /usr/share, we should also allow for
that too.

Simon.