Bug#779063: exim4-daemon-light: file size tripled with no apparent reason

[Andreas Metzler]

On 2015-02-24 Andreas Metzler <ametzler at bebt.de> wrote:
> On 2015-02-24 Uwe Storbeck <uwe at ibr.ch> wrote:
> [...]
> > the installed size of package exim4-daemon-light on amd64 has
> > increased from 1287 to 3268 between versions 4.84-7 and 4.84-8
> > without any apparent reason in the changelog:
> [...]
> > The file size of the exim4 binary has more than tripled between
> > the two package versions:
> > -rwsr-xr-x root/root   1031104 2015-02-07 16:40 ./usr/sbin/exim4
> > -rwsr-xr-x root/root   3124160 2015-02-17 18:45 ./usr/sbin/exim4
> [...]

> you are right, and it is even reproducible. The only explanation I can
> think of is that some part of the toolchain runs amok after addition
> of the two patches.

Stranger and stranger:
(sid-AMD64)ametzler at argenau:/tmp/EXIM4/exim-4.84$ du -s b-*/*/exim debian/*/usr/sbin/exim4
3760    b-exim4-daemon-heavy/build-Linux-x86_64/exim
3312    b-exim4-daemon-light/build-Linux-x86_64/exim
1132    debian/exim4-daemon-heavy/usr/sbin/exim4
1008    debian/exim4-daemon-light/usr/sbin/exim4
(sid-AMD64)ametzler at argenau:/tmp/EXIM4/exim-4.84$ ls -lhsk b-*/*/exim debian/*/usr/sbin/exim4
 3.7M -rwxrwxr-x 1 ametzler ametzler 3.7M Feb 28 18:25 b-exim4-daemon-heavy/build-Linux-x86_64/exim
 3.3M -rwxrwxr-x 1 ametzler ametzler 5.3M Feb 28 18:25 b-exim4-daemon-light/build-Linux-x86_64/exim
 1.2M -rwsr-xr-x 1 ametzler ametzler 1.2M Feb 28 18:25 debian/exim4-daemon-heavy/usr/sbin/exim4
1008K -rwsr-xr-x 1 ametzler ametzler 3.0M Feb 28 18:25 debian/exim4-daemon-light/usr/sbin/exim4

The build generates a sparse file, which actually only takes up about
1 MB of space. However, when we run the file through dpkg sparseness
is lost.

cu Andreas

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