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Idea #23909: Synaptic - install file size estimates

Written by jvin248 the 7 Mar 10 at 13:47. Related project: Synaptic package manager. Status: New
Rationale
While uninstalling some programs to save disk space .. other than knowing the Open Office consumes about 300MB, Firefox is big, documentation directory is big, and Gimp is 50MB .. there is not an easy way to see that by uninstalling program "X" it will save how much disk space.

No way to sort/know which programs are the largest space consumers on a disk.

[running baobab on root / and playing detective can get some of this teased out; but not easy for regular users]
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Solution #1: Synaptic - colum to show estimated space consumption
Written by jvin248 the 7 Mar 10 at 13:47.
Synaptic will report during install of a new package how much disk space will be consumed after unpacking. So the data is stored somewhere already, just need to report it.

Add a column in Synaptic that shows estimated space consumed by an installed package. Enhance with estimates for other programs not installed yet. Further improvement is to show the additional dependent programs that are required for a particular package:

package ..this file size ... dependencies size
X ............ 1kb ............ 2GB

If these columns will be compute intensive, add an option button to turn on the columns (with a warning to go get a coffee with the first run).


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Darwin Survivor (Brainstorm moderator) wrote on the 8 Mar 10 at 22:23
Been looking for this for a while. One thing to note is that new people won't understand the multiple-dependency library scenerio.

Ex: Choqok and K3B both depend on KDE-Base. Removing either one will free say 25MB. Removing *both* will free say 450MB!

This could get confusing for users and even developers when they need to decide how to list that extra 400MB. This becomes especially apparent if "libraries" are hidden in the package manager.

lootic wrote on the 13 Mar 10 at 10:47
the thing is that the users that dont know that stuff isnt using synaptic that much.

gmos wrote on the 14 Mar 10 at 11:57
"Add a column in Synaptic that shows estimated space consumed by an installed package."
"No way to sort/know which programs are the largest space consumers on a disk. "
--

There is one there already. Just choose to display it >Settings>Preferences>Columns and Fonts, tick the 'Installed Size' option.
Once displayed, clicking on the column title will sort the packages by the installed size.

eg on my machine ubuntu-docs is the largest single package at 259MB, then ia32-libs at 132MB...bogofilter is the smallest at just 8192 bytes.

Estimating something like OpenOffice is not straightforward, as it is not a single application/package,but many modules, ie there are core/ common packages as well as separate packages for the different functions and features (eg 'writer', 'base', 'calc' 'thesaurus' etc).

But I agree that it would be useful to see the size of the dependencies that could also be removed along with the chosen package. (After removing packages I usually select 'Status' view to see the auto-removable packages left behind, and their size).


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