Package: live-build Version: 1:20191221 Owner: jnq...@gmail.com in handling firmware, archive content files are downloaded and extracted in order to obtain a list of firmware packages. the uncompressed file is saved in the cache. it is not removed from the cache once finished with. this makes sense since the whole point of a cache is to reuse stuff, but the fact is that it never actually gets re-used, the code always deletes any existing file and replaces it with a fresh copy.
this might not be so bad if building with more than just the main archive area and main is not the last in the list, since contrib and non-free are much smaller files than main, but otherwise this could be somewhat significant to users. The main file, currently, for amd64, is a little over 600MiB! there are several improvements that could be made, but we can implement a very simple initial fix of simply by deleting this file once we've finished with it. patch to be submitted via salsa soon