On Wed, 2003-01-08 at 19:46, Evan Prodromou wrote: > >>>>> "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. It even takes too long (considering the task of 'simply' display a list) on a PII 350MHz with enough RAM. And I don't consider this an old machine. > * 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. Good idea. I think even more than the x86 people, the SPARC port could profit from that - optimisation makes much more difference for some things there, I heard. > * 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. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't. Anybody asking why should go, setup a SuSE machine and do a couple of installs/uninstalls with different versions. Reaching Debian, I thought I had successfully fled that problem. > * 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". I think this one is sort of in progress with the menu system rewrite - if the categories make it into the packaging system. (Not heard of the menu thing for some time, though - but then, I'm mostly ignoring the [desktop] threads as I find these items not particularly interesting). > 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. You talk to your vim and hack on dpkg? Honestly: there is debian-devel and debian-dpkg, the latter being of course more specialized. cheers -- vbi -- featured link: http://fortytwo.ch/smtp
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