[[!tag debian]]

This is an idea. I don't have the time to work on it myself, but I thought I'd throw it out in case someone else finds it interesting.

When you install a Debian package, it pulls in its dependencies and recommended packages, and those pull in theirs. For simple cases, this is all fine, but sometimes there's surprises. Installing mutt to a base system pulls in libgpgme, which pulls in gnupg, which pulls in a pinentry package, which can pull in all of GNOME. Or at least people claim that.

It strikes me that it'd be cool for someone to implement a QA service for Debian that measures, for each package, how much installing it adds to the system. It should probably do this in various scenarios:

• A base system, i.e., the output of debootstrap.
• A build system, with build-essentian installed.
• A base GNOME system, with gnome-core installed.
• A full GNOME system, with gnome installed.
• Similarly for KDE and each other desktop environment in Debian.

The service would do the installs regularly (daily?), and produce reports. It would also do alerts, such as notify the maintainers when installed size grows too large compared to installing it in stable, or a previous run in unstable. For example, if installing mutt suddenly installs 100 gigabytes more than yesterday, it's probably a good idea to alert interested parties.

Implementing this should be fairly easy, since the actual test is just running debootstrap, and possibly apt-get install. Some experimentation with configuration, caching, and eatmydata may be useful to gain speed. Possibly actual package installation can be skipped, and the whole thing could be implemented just by analysing package metadata.

Maybe it even exists, and I just don't know about it. That'd be cool, too.