Re: dpkg suggestion
On 27 Aug 1998, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Hi,
> >>"Edward" == Edward Betts <edward@hairnet.demon.co.uk> writes:
>
> Edward> The obvious think to do is to copy the sendmail way, when the
> Edward> database gets to large, in our case the dpkg package database
> Edward> and in the case of sendmail the aliases database, start
> Edward> representing it as a database instead of text.
>
> Yes. This may happen in the future. However, there are certain
> advantages of a human readable database (I spend a lot of time using
> less on /var/lib/dpkg/available; and in the info/* files).
But, presumably you know SQL? And if you don't, I am sure you could learn
it quickly. Then you would find it easy to type things like:
SELECT dep_on FROM packages,dependencies WHERE packages.pack_name =
dependencies.pack_name
And you would fairly rapidly find that you could find out much more
complex derived statistics more simply (and, of course, you'd quickly
write some cool command-line utilities to do various powerful things this
way).
So human readability, while certainly an issue, could be well served by a
database solution.
>
> Edward> dpkg, dselect, pkg-order they are all to slow, it is time to
> Edward> drop the need for text files for large databases.
>
> Have you looked at APT? How it handles data? How it does not
> demand that the text databases all go away?
>
> Edward> If you really wanted you could have a program that would dump
> Edward> an identical text file from the database.
>
> Do it the other way around. Have the text database be the
> master, and let the program parse that (once); just like apt does.
There is no denying that the deity team came up with a neat solution
there.
However, I think the way we should be looking is moving it to an RDBMS.
In fact, I think that most of /etc and /var could benefit from this
transition.
If no one else does, I shall produce a database design for dpkg sometime
in the next week or two, and post it to -dpkg.
Jules
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| Jules aka | jules@debian.org | Richmond, Surrey |
| Julian Bean | jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk | TW9 2TF *UK* |
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