Re: debian-trivia

[Evan Prodromou <evan@debian.org>]

>>>>> "AH" == Alexander Hvostov <alex@aoi.dyndns.org> writes:

    AH> That should be a good start. Anyone care to comment?

Yes.

I'm no genius, but even to a dunderhead like me, it seems like the
Debian package mechanism is getting quite creaky with age. Something
that scaled well for a package catalog in the hundreds does terribly for
package catalogs in the tens of thousands.  For example:

        * Loading package catalogs takes a long time on loaded or
          low-memory machines.

        * Browsing package catalogs for useful packages is practically
          impossible.

It seems like we need a revamp of the Debian catalog and package
format to allow at least the following:

        * Sub-architectures. Allow some binary packages that are
          CPU-bound to be optimized for particular chips. For example,
          a Pentium II computer might be able to install packages
          tagged for the i386/i686 architecture, the i386/i586
          architecture, and the i386 architecture.

        * Multiple versions of the same package. Instead of having 10
          jillion python2.2, python2.1, and python1.5 library
          packages, allow multiple binaries tagged with the
          appropriate version.

        * Hierarchical categories. We have <10 categories of software
          in the Debian system right now. This is just laughable. We
          need to be able to tag packages according to real useful
          categories, like "Network/Internet/Clients/Chat/IRC" or
          "Libraries/DataFormat/XML/Parser". This should make browsing
          for appropriate software a lot easier than "apt-cache search
          irc" or "apt-cache search xml".

        * Optimizations of the catalog as stored at the leaf node
          machine.

My main comment is this: where does this discussion go on? On
debian-devel? -private? Who do I talk to to get Debian working better
for me.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou
evan@debian.org