Re: RFC: implementation of package pools
Adam Heath wrote:
>
> >
> > [..]/pool/main/libm/libmng/
> > [...]
>
> What kind of distribution does this give us? How many packages in each dir,
> etc. I would have preferred a 2 level hash.
>
This thing again. :(
I agree with Adam, splitting into directories according to a prefix
of the name is _nonsense_. By the way, this topic had been discussed
before and my sober proposal was silently dismissed. [1]
Let's review this matter.
* Ideally, all packages would lie flat in a single directory. example
/package-pool
* However, some people suggested that putting all packages for
a single source is a good idea (it becomes a distribution point for
that software). I totally disagree with this. But let's say it's
done that way. (It doesn't matter for the following argument...)
* This means that all packages or package directories would be in a
single directory. Unfortunately this is not possible because ext2fs
is a terrible filesystem. [can't handle dirs with a lot of entries well]
* You have to split the pools directory in order to preserve
file-system performance for a large number of packages. That is,
_performance_ is the only reason for doing this. The directory
names ultimately don't have to be human readable, since such _simple minded_
prefixing doesn't at all ease browsing the ftp archive.
* Then, you must use a REAL static hash function for determining how
this split is going to happen. If you don't know hash functions well,
someone else surely does. Feel free to ask for advice!
If anybody here has objections to these points, we'd better sort them
out as I have very strong confidence in these.
Another thing.
Can please somebody tell me why this is not on a CVS server? Why can't
people contribute patches to it? Why is this development discussion
going on in private instead of in debian-pool? This is too important
to leave to the personal decisions of a handful of eleet.
I've asked for the specifications of dinstall. I've also asked
if I should package dinstall. Nobody answered. I'd like to contribute
to package pools, so I await your comments on this.
Many thanks!
[1] This kind of refusal to co-operation is not good for Debian.
--
Eray (exa) Ozkural
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
e-mail: erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo/
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