Re: Bloated package file (Was: Re: ITP: mencal -- A menstruation calendar)
On Mon, Mar 25, 2002 at 11:38:45PM +0000, Wilmer van der Gaast wrote:
> Jeroen Dekkers@lists.debian-devel@Mon, 25 Mar 2002 21:14:27 +0100:
> > First of all, why should the Packages file be readable? Isn't it just
> > an index?
> >
> If this is about the file being a textfile: That's what I love about
> Debian.. With RPM I can't manually change things when the system messes
> up, with Debian I can.
>
> But you probably don't mean that..
>
> > Second, all the human readable descriptions would be in the different
> > pool directory, i.e. in the file pool/main/f/foobar/Packages.
> >
> I think downloading *all* those separate files will be a *lot* slower.
> OF course, it's only the initial download, still an initial download
> would mean >8000 requests instead of <10.
Speak HTTP/1.1 with persistant sessions. I bet the performance hit (both
in bandwidth and in time) won't reach 'human noticeable' on anything except
perhaps a dialup connection, for the full set - and the savings of being
able to pull only those packages which interest you (something I'd expect
to be very common for dialup folks) will more than offset that.
Granted, it might cause you problems if you wanted to use the grep-dctrl
family extensively, but it's easy enough to mirror the entire thing into
a local file (or database, even) which is functionally equivalent to the
Packages file.
--
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Joel Baker System Administrator - lightbearer.com
lucifer@lightbearer.com http://users.lightbearer.com/lucifer/
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