Moving out apt metadata
As some of you may know, in the N900, the root file system is stored in a
OneNAND chip with 256M of space. Meanwhile /home and /home/user/MyDocs are
in a eMMC in two different partitions: ~2GB (ext2) for /home and ~29GB (vfat)
for /home/user/MyDocs.The OneNAND is faster than the eMMC, and it’s intended to host only the Maemo
main system, moving out the third party applications to the eMMC. Though, this
new layout has brought new limitations, the more visible one is the /opt problem
[2].
One of the debates about what left and what not in the OneNAND is the apt database and metadata. Moving out the apt database out from the OneNAND to the eMMC, in my personal opinion, is very risky: It will slow down the database processing (which is already slow given the size of the Fremantle repositories), and if the eMMC gets corrupted, the base system wouldn’t be upgreadable either, because apt couldn’t read its database. And that’s why I’m against the proposal.
Nevertheless I’m aware that the apt metadata and database could be huge, consuming much of the precious OpenNAND storing space. Just to mention it, I’ve found myself, in my development cycles, moving out those files.
That’s why I cooked this script: move-apt-dirs.sh
WARNING: this script is not official. You’re at your own if you run it: no promises, no guaranties.
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