[pkg-fso-maint] Emdebian Grid to come with install.sh?

[Steffen Möller]

Hello,

there is a subproject of Debian called "emdebian" that helps Debian for embedded devices: it reduces the size of the packages
while leaving the build script etc mostly intact. This would help our base images a real lot in the sense that we can offer more
thn just the very bare metal for the 512MB flash.

The installation is as easy as to add another apt-source. The migration back and forth is possible any time. However, the success
as it seems victimises some files that many of us like - at least for their desktop, like man pages. But what you think for
install.sh. Should that suggest using the emdebian.org packages by default? If not by default, should we not mention that effort
on our web pages somewhere?

I could well imagine, that via Emdebian we would also get more contact with other ARM-Debian users, from which again we (or they)
might profit in some way.

Thanks and greetings

Steffen

# apt-get install findutils binutils
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
binutils is already the newest version.
The following packages will be upgraded:
  findutils
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 487 not upgraded.
Need to get 160kB of archives.
After this operation, 1393kB disk space will be freed.

how this works, well

$ dpkg -L findutils | wc
    143     143    4536

and the new one is somewhat less verbose

# dpkg -L findutils
/.
/usr
/usr/bin
/usr/bin/oldfind
/usr/bin/find
/usr/bin/xargs
/usr/share
/usr/share/locale
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/findutils
/usr/share/doc/findutils/copyright.gz

However, the effect is often just great:

The following packages will be upgraded:
  dbus-x11
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 486 not upgraded.
Need to get 16.5kB of archives.
After this operation, 41.0kB disk space will be freed.
Get:1 http://www.emdebian.org sid/main dbus-x11 1.2.24-3em1 [16.5kB]

The following packages will be upgraded:
  bash
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 485 not upgraded.
Need to get 414kB of archives.
After this operation, 2658kB disk space will be freed.
Get:1 http://www.emdebian.org sid/main bash 4.1-3em1 [414kB]
Fetched 414kB in 8s (47.2kB/s)
debconf: delaying package configuration, since apt-utils is not installed
Can not write log, openpty() failed (/dev/pts not mounted?)
(Reading database ... 41789 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace bash 4.1-3 (using .../bash_4.1-3em1_armel.deb) ...

The following packages will be upgraded:
  dpkg fakeroot util-linux wget
4 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 481 not upgraded.
Need to get 912kB of archives.
After this operation, 8086kB disk space will be freed.

and since this gets a bit too slow when selected individually, here is what apt-get -u dist-upgrade says:

Need to get 135MB of archives.
After this operation, 212MB disk space will be freed.