Hello, all!
I have searched Wikipedia and the Debian wiki.  I have Googled.  I am clearly
using the wrong search terms, although I tried rewording in sundry different
ways.

Approximately, in round terms, how may packages are available in Debian
(Squeeze?)
1. in main
2. in main, contrib and non-free

I have an idea of roughly 20,000 in my head, but cannot remember why I think
it and it may be vastly out.  Nor into which of my two categories the figure
falls, if by any miracle it is correct.

Thanks,
Lisi

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On Tuesday 16 October 2012 11:30:41 Lisi wrote:
                                                               ^^^^

many, not may :-(

Lisi

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On Tue, 16 Oct 2012 11:30:41 +0100

Maybe from Synaptic? It lists a total of packages it can fetch in the
bottom left corner. I have all three archives active + backports,
testing and unstable and Synaptic reports 43132 packages is available.

But the question might be, what's a package, and what's a libary? Just
my thoughts though.

Cheers :)

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On Tue 16 Oct 2012 at 11:30:41 +0100, Lisi wrote:

Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list to have only the line

   deb <your_mirror> squeeze non-free

Then

   apt-get update

and look at the output.

Add "contrib" to the line above and repeat, Do the same with "main" added.
Do sums.

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According to my reading of the manual:

aptitude search '~smain'
 and
aptitude search '~smain|~scontrib|~snon-free'

should give you the answers you seek, however, I seem to get 0 for the
first and only 626 for the second, so my search-fu is failing me today.

Everything's a package, though it'd make sense to remove virtual
packages from the list.

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This can be answered (by a developer) using UDD -
http://wiki.debian.org/UltimateDebianDatabase

The answer today is

udd=> select count(*),release from public.packages group by release;
 count  |         release          
--------+--------------------------
      2 | wheezy-security
 272170 | wheezy
 189517 | squeeze
 298810 | sid
  13816 | squeeze-backports
   8712 | squeeze-security
  34908 | experimental
    746 | wheezy-proposed-updates
    372 | squeeze-updates
    625 | squeeze-proposed-updates
(10 rows)

or source packages

udd=> select count(*),release from public.sources group by release;
 count |         release          
-------+--------------------------
     1 | wheezy-security
 17867 | wheezy
 14969 | squeeze
 18854 | sid
   599 | squeeze-backports
   207 | squeeze-security
  1007 | experimental
    16 | wheezy-proposed-updates
     6 | squeeze-updates
     9 | squeeze-proposed-updates
(10 rows)

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On Ma, 16 oct 12, 11:30:41, Lisi wrote:

Source or binary packages? If you consider source packages then Open
Office counts as one package, but if you consider binary packages it
will be a lot more (especially since Debian Maintainers have the good
habit of splitting big packages to accommodate various use cases.

http://www.debian.org/intro/about mentions "over 29000". aptitude gets
me 43004 binary packages for squeeze (i386, of which contrib 271 and
non-free 583) so those should be source packages:

$ aptitude search ~Astable | wc -l
43004
$ aptitude search ~Astable~scontrib | wc -l
271
$ aptitude search ~Astable~snon-free | wc -l
583

(~s works because the archive component is part of the section name for
packages not in main)

Kind regards,
Andrei
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On Ma, 16 oct 12, 11:56:34, Jon Dowland wrote:

The numbers are too big in my opinion, is this maybe for all
architectures?

Only main?

Kind regards,
Andrei
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On 16/10/12 11:30, Lisi wrote:
for i in main contrib non-free; do echo $i:; curl -s
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/$i/binary-amd64/Packages.bz2 |
bunzip2 -c | grep Package: | sort -u | wc -l ;done

I get:
main:
28128
contrib:
182
non-free:
383

All a bit unscientific, but it might suit your needs

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On Tuesday 16 October 2012 11:46:01 Titanus Eramius wrote:

Thanks!  That is exactly what I wanted to know.  I have not got Synaptic
installed, since I prefer the command line for package management.  Perhaps
the information is also available in aptitude's n-curses interface.  I didn't
think to look. :-(  There is also probably a command line way to do it in
either apt-get or aptitude.  I just don't know it. :-(

D'oh!  I had thought (or rather, clearly not thought) that for present
purposes that wasn't all that significant.  Though come to think of it, that
may be why I had the figure of 20,000 in my head.  Applications and not
libraries.

So I asked the wrong question anyway.

Thanks for all the pointers!

Lisi

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On Tuesday 16 October 2012 11:55:55 Brian wrote:

Thanks!

Lisi

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On Ma, 16 oct 12, 14:00:10, Andrei POPESCU wrote:

Oups, 'stable' will also match 'unstable', so the correct search (also
excluding non-Debian sources) is:

$ aptitude search '~A^stable~ODebian' | wc -l
28875
$ aptitude search '~A^stable~ODebian~scontrib' | wc -l
189
$ aptitude search '~A^stable~ODebian~snon-free' | wc -l
408

My numbers are still a bit bigger than the count from the Packages file,
but don't know why (it doesn't seem to be due to virtual packages).

Kind regards,
Andrei
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What does, then?

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Because "~s" ("?section()") doesn't correspond to main/contrib/non-free.

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(Andrei uses this search term in his replies)

"~A" ("?archive()")

You can see the section to which a package belongs ("utils" in this
case) if you request that information when specifying a format for the
output of aptitude or dpkg-query, for example:

[th@localhost:~]$ dpkg-query -W
-f='${Package}\t${Section}\t${Version}\n' util-linux
util-linux      utils   2.20.1-5.2
[th@localhost:~]$ aptitude search -F '%p %s %t %v' util-linux
util-linux                                                 utils
testing                                 2.20.1-5.2
util-linux-locales                                         utils
testing                                 <none>
[th@localhost:~]$ aptitude search -F '%p %s %t %v' util-linux\$
util-linux                                                 utils
testing                                 2.20.1-5.2
[th@localhost:~]$

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On Tue 16 Oct 2012 at 12:06:17 +0100, Lisi wrote:

Without the faffing about with getting a root prompt and using an
editor:

cat /var/lib/dpkg/available | grep '^Section:' | wc -l
cat /var/lib/dpkg/available | grep '^Section: non-free' | wc -l
cat /var/lib/dpkg/available | grep '^Section: contrib' | wc -l

28,795, 403 and 187 respectively for me.

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On Tuesday 16 October 2012 13:59:21 Brian wrote:

That's terrific!  Thanks, Brian.

Thanks all of you for your informative and helpful replies.

Lisi

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On Tue, 16 Oct 2012 13:59:21 +0100

The first one gives me 926 on an amd64 X-less squeeze server, which is
around the number of installed packages.

sources.list:
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main non-free contrib
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main non-free contrib

deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib
non-free

# squeeze-updates, previously known as 'volatile'
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-updates main contrib
non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-updates main contrib
non-free

'apt-cache stats' from the same machine gives:

Total package names: 37481 (750 k)
Total package structures: 37481 (2,099 k)
  Normal packages: 28432
  Pure virtual packages: 390
  Single virtual packages: 3261
  Mixed virtual packages: 258
  Missing: 5140
Total distinct versions: 28904 (2,081 k)
Total distinct descriptions: 28904 (694 k)
Total dependencies: 177309 (4,965 k)
Total ver/file relations: 30947 (743 k)
Total Desc/File relations: 28904 (694 k)
Total Provides mappings: 5838 (117 k)
Total globbed strings: 133 (1,465 )
Total dependency version space: 734 k
Total slack space: 49.2 k
Total space accounted for: 10.1 M

Being X-less, there's no Synaptic, however on my sid workstation,
Synaptic reports '39614 packages listed' as being the sum of stats'
'Normal packages' and 'Mixed virtual packages', which would be 28,690
here.

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FWIW tons of packages doesn't mean tons of apps etc., since of the
strange policy to split some packages in an insane way, e.g. the jackd
packages are split really insane. Or does any package depend to libjack
without jackd? And if so, why?

There often is the argument that shared libs will keep a system small,
but bad hard dependencies often enlarge a system. On Arch there e.g. is
a dependency to systemd. I use intitscripts, not systemd, but have got
systemd installed. On Debian for example there's a hard dependency to
pulseaudio for some apps, even if it's completely useless.

And FWIW, meta-packages only summarize some other packages, so the count
of packages gives information about big nothing.

2 Cents,
Ralf

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On Ma, 16 oct 12, 08:01:59, Tom H wrote:

In theory true, but in practice:

$ apt-cache show nvidia-glx | grep ^Section
Section: non-free/x11

This means a search for contrib or non-free with ~s will succeed, but
not for for main, since packages in main don't advertise the archive
component in the Section field.

Kind regards,
Andrei
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On Ma, 16 oct 12, 17:34:19, Ralf Mardorf wrote:

Why should every application *capable* of outputting to jackd force one
to install jackd?

Care to provide some examples? Looking through the reverse dependencies
of the package 'pulseaudio' the only strange one is
kde-telepathy-call-ui. If you meant dependency to libpulse, then the
answer is the same as for jackd.

We don't know anything about Lisi's use case, so this is maybe a bit
premature?

Kind regards,
Andrei
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Jackd could be a "suggested dependency", if you don't use jackd, why
should the app link against the lib? The app should link against it, as
soon as you configure the app to use jackd and than you need jackd
completely, not only the lib.

Ok, I only know one GNOME package, but to use GNOME you need this
package.

Yesno. I also like to hear about the count of packages, but this
information is nearly useless.

Regards,
Ralf

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On Ma, 16 oct 12, 18:44:20, Ralf Mardorf wrote:

As far as I know (not my area of expertise, but I have been struggling
to compile XBMC for my Raspberry Pi recently), such capabilities are
compile time options.

When you compile an application with output capability to jackd and/or
pulseaudio the corresponding library becomes a hard dependency (i.e. the
application may even crash if the library is not installed).

Or would you expect regular users to recompile applications just to
choose between plain alsa, pulseaudio or jackd output?

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Andrei
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No, compiling shouldn't be needed. This is a discussion we very often
had on jack mailing list, when split packages failed.
I don't know why an app should crash, as long as it doesn't try to
access the missing lib. It might crash, I don't know, but it should be
possible to get an app without jackd support and to load jackd support
as a plugin or something like that. There was a mail about Iceweasel and
language support some minutes ago. All language packages get installed
by default, so they could become one package. Ok, it's possible to
remove them manually, after installing, pff, it's also possible to
delete the files manually after installing ;).

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On Ma, 16 oct 12, 19:22:22, Ralf Mardorf wrote:

Yes, but that depends on how the application is written. Some use
plugins (vlc), others have compile time options (mplayer, XBMC).

Kind regards,
Andrei
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