first things first: at least in command-line mode (i.e., outside of
fullscreen ncurses), could we defer reading package tags until doing so is
definitely necessary? this would save us a nice chunk on the majority of
operations,
though doing so might be necessary for broader reasons than i
imagine.
an strace -c of "aptitude install libopenexr2-dev" yielded the following:
this goes on for rather some time. if we handled tag lexing lazily, and it
indeed usually isn't necessary, we cut this out without having to touch the
lexing code. if we turn this into an mmap (with, if necessary, a sliding
window sized to taste -- i presume this is the method of "dynamicmmap"?),
we kill all those reads, and maybe tag lexing becomes fast enough that we
don't care about it running.
do either of these ideas excite anyone?