"Defect"? I understand you can be a purist and dislike the symlink forest, but I've installed a shitload of nonoptified packages (including Samba and the whole of sunrpc, nfs, samba and inetd) and I still have 58 MiB free. And I didn't delete a single locale...

It was _less than a year ago_ that we were happily using a device with ONLY the 256MiB chip -- no ext3 partition. Though to be fair, heavy data files were usually installed to the FAT32 sdcard, and the base system was smaller.

You shouldn't really be able hit the rootfs limit without installing non-extras-stable packages.