Re: Connffiles?

[Raul Miller <rdm@tad.micro.umn.edu>]

David Engel:
   > How much CPU time and disk space does conffile processing incur?
   > In some ways, it makes sense for all files to be considered
   > conffiles.

Ian Jackson:
   It requires every file to be processed with md5sum twice during
   installation; the checksums are 128 bits (16 bytes) long, and come
   to 32 bytes when they're stored as hex in the dpkg databases.

   Apart from some order-n^2 algorithms used in dpkg's conffiles
   processing, which could be changed, doing this would double the
   size of the /var/lib/dpkg databases and reduce installation speed
   by a factor of 3 or 4, I think - more on low-CPU systems.

It would be nice to have a debian configuration *option* to maintain
all files as conffiles.  Not for release 1.1 of debian, however.

-- 
Raul