To: submit@bugs.debian.org
From: pmaydell@chiark.greenend.org.uk
Subject: cruft: uses too much disk space
Date: Sat, 20 Nov 1999 02:27:16 +0000
Sender: pm215@watchdragon.demon.co.uk
Message-Id: <E11p0FA-0003Uk-00@watchdragon.demon.co.uk>

Package: cruft
Version: 0.9.5
Severity: wishlist

The way cruft is designed causes it to use rather a lot of disk
space. For example, when producing a report on my fairly 
small system (filesystems 1GB, 250MB, 250MB) it put 15MB
of stuff into /var/spool/cruft/.

Surely this could be reduced somewhat by a cleverer algorithm?
For example, /usr/lib/cruft/explain/dev is just a 'find /dev'
command. This means that all the files in /dev are listed
in a file in the spool. It would be better to allow something
like a wildcard or regexp syntax so you didn't have to list
all the files in /dev explicitly. 
This gets much worse if you use this strategy for directories
like /usr/local, naturally. 

I think that a better way to do the job would be to first
create the files to be used to filter the file names, as we
do now (expl_* and need_*), but then to do the weeding out of 
'OK' files on the fly as part of the pipeline 'find $DRIVE...',
rather than creating large file_* files and then processing
them. 
Obviously this would be quite a bit of work :->

Peter Maydell