On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 07:50:34PM +0200, Michelle Konzack wrote: > > And what about to use alternative "storage" > > like DBs and XML? We have SQLite that could be useful. > Too blown... XML of course, but solutions like SQLite could be worth investigating. More generally, which data structure/access method does apt/dpkg use to query the Packages files? (yes, I'm ready to read replies like "go and read the code" :). I guess the whole Packages database is read in memory at startup, stocked in some data structure which is accessed when needed. In this way the work of creating the data structure has to be performed each time apt/dpkg are run. Using a database (whatever: sqlite, mysql, dbm files, ... I'm just discussing the architecture) the data structure would be built on update actions and needs not to be rebuild each time apt/dpkg are run, it would just be queried. Of course in this way I'm not adressing the bandwith issue, but only the processing time. Regarding bandwith I think the right way to go is to use diffs, our Packages file are relatively stable and I guess that between upgrades only a minor part of them changes. We can both consider distributing incremental packages, but I think it would be easier to just perform diffing on the network and make apt downloads just diffs using for example HTTP Range headers (or whatever, I don't remember the exact name). Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli -*- Computer Science PhD student @ Uny Bologna, Italy zack@{cs.unibo.it,debian.org,bononia.it} -%- http://www.bononia.it/zack/ If there's any real truth it's that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. -!-
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