Re: "dselect" replacement team

[Tony Finch <fanf@lspace.org>]

Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca> wrote:
>
>The only important factor is time to read the entire text file and the
>resulting memory usage of the internal result. Binary searches are
>performed on in memory copies which naturally will be optimized for
>whatever operations are most frequently performed on it. 
>
>Storage on disk only becomes a concern when the overhead of a text file
>starts to get sickening (gzip helps with this) or when the parse time is
>very high, which I doubt we will see, I was doing read tests on 6M
>package files and it was only up to about 4 seconds on my 486.

The main problem with dpkg at the moment is that the database is split
over a large number of files -- there is one file for each installed
package that lists the files that that package contains. Since there
may be hundreds of installed packages, this is a lot of slow directory
lookups to do. I think this is more important than the size of any
text file.

Tony.