Re: web address in control file.
On Fri, 16 Jan 1998, Christian Schwarz wrote:
> Several new fields have been suggested (I'll dig into my mail archive if
> the discussion starts again), including "Author", etc.
We have been waiting for some decesion on Behan's keywords field for some
time now as well. :<
> The major argument against any new fields is that all control fields are
> included in the Packages/available/status files, and since these files are
> already very large, dpkg & friends will probably slow down if we add more
> control fields.
This is a general problem with dpkg and friends, I don't think it is
really a valid argument. Dpkg will get slower and use more memory the more
packages we have and the more control fields we have. Deity and it's
routines should scale a bit better (http://www.debian.org/~jgg/deity/cache).
However, as it is dpkg parses these files quite quickly,
time dpkg --status libtool
1.13user 0.14system 0:01.64elapsed 77%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (358major+490minor)pagefaults 0swaps
1.6s on a p166 isn't -too- bad.
There is an alternative though. We can split the packages file into
Packages and Packages.extra. Packages.extra would have all these new
fields, something like:
Package: libtool
Version: 1.12
Url: http://...
Keywords: ....
Etc, etc, etc,
Deity, which should be the major user of these fields, can simply merge
the two files and dpkg-scanpackages can be changed to build the new file.
I am also pretty sure that dpkg will include the entire contents of the
control file in the status file which means the information will be
kept locally once the package is installed (and only the packages that are
installed).
I'm not sure what the point would be though :|
Jason
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