Bug#703366: RFH: apt-file -- search for files within Debian packages (command-line interface)

[Stefan Fritsch <sf@sfritsch.de>]

On Thursday 21 March 2013, Nick Black wrote:
> Niels Thykier left as an exercise for the reader:
> >   As understood Nick, he was not interested in maintaining the
> >   current
> > 
> > Perl variant of apt-file, but he would be interested in rewriting
> > (and maintain said rewrite of) apt-file.  He was certain he
> > could improve the search speed of apt-file while doing so. 
> > Given the results of his apt-show-versions rewrite I am looking
> > forward to that rewrite with great anticipation.  :)

The search speed is currently dominated by the decompression time. 
That could be easily cut down by changing the local files to be 
compressed with lzo instead of gzip. But IMHO you don't want to keep > 
300MB of uncompressed data lying on the local hard disk, so there are 
limits to the speed up you can achieve. Unless you want to introduce 
some nifty compressed searchable index format.

> As discussed on #depian-APT, aye, I'm going to begin on this today,
> hoping to finish it up by early next week. Apt-file has more
> interactions with the APT ecosystem than apt-show-versions did,
> and also a larger feature set. The core is very amenable to the
> design patterns that already exist.

If you and Niels could send me the backlogs of those talks, I would be 
interested.

Cheers,
Stefan