Re: Connffiles?

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

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

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.

Ian.