Re: dpkg suggestion
On Thu, 27 Aug 1998, Edward Betts wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Aug, 1998, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> > Hi,
> > >>"Edward" == Edward Betts <edward@hairnet.demon.co.uk> writes:
> >
> > Edward> Is that a typo? pkg-node or pkg-nodep
> >
> > pkg-nodep
> >
> > Edward> 22:21:03 $ pkg-nodep > /dev/null
> > Edward> 22:21:29 $
> > Edward> it is a bit slow?
> >
> > Patches for a speedup shall be gratefully accepted.
>
> I have had a look at the code, and I can not see any immediate speed-ups. The
> obvious think to do is to copy the sendmail way, when the database gets to
> large, in our case the dpkg package database and in the case of sendmail the
> aliases database, start representing it as a database instead of text. Great,
> at the moment I can right a quick awk script to look for stuff in the dpkg
> database of packages, that I could not if it was a database. But that agument
> falls apart when you relise that I can not do any real work like that because
> the stuff I am working on is not going to stay on the same place on the
> machine. At some point /var/lib/dpkg will become /var/state/dpkg, and who
> knows it might change again.
>
> Give it up, dpkg, dselect, pkg-order they are all to slow, it is time to drop
> the need for text files for large databases.
>
> If you really wanted you could have a program that would dump an identical
> text file from the database.
You are, of course, not alone in thinking this.
It has been suggested many times before, and lots of people have agreed.
Unfortunately, our flagship product ;-) dpkg is in something of a state of
flux. Its maintainers, Klee and Ian, are both extremely busy people, with
a lot on their plates, and the dpkg source code is sufficiently convoluted
that few developers know their way around it.
There is a unstable branch of dpkg which has been described as 'showing
promise' - but it isn't going anywhere at the moment, AFAIK.
It has been on my personal list of 'things-to-do-sometime' for a while to
design a relation structure to store all the data in available, status,
*.list et al.. but I haven't got round to it yet...
Jules
[Discussion in detail should go to debian-dpkg]
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| Julian Bean | jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk | TW9 2TF *UK* |
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