Re: [gentoo-dev] Idea for the portage maintainers

[Todd Berman <tberman@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, 2004-12-04 at 11:59 -0500, Andrew Gaffney wrote:
> Todd Berman wrote:
> > On Mon, 2004-12-04 at 11:22 -0500, Andrew Gaffney wrote:
> > 
> >>Troy Dack wrote:
> >>
> >>>Another point against a monolithic zip containing all the ebuilds (or
> >>>even per directory zips) is the performance hit that slow machines would
> >>>take, not everybody runs gentoo on a 2GHz plus machine (eg: my little
> >>>PII-400 in the corner)
> >>
> >>Or my little P233 Thinkpad...
> >>
> > 
> > 
> > And with the current setup of writing thousands of 1K files that little
> > p233 thinkpad really flys i bet...
> 
> I'm not sure if that was supposed to be sarcastic, but yes, it does fly. It only takes 
> slightly longer to sync than my Athlon 1.3GHz desktop. The only part that takes forever is 
> updating the portage cache. That's why I just use a NFS shared portage tree from my 
> desktop machine now.

In a way it was and in a way it wasn't. I honestly don't understand how
you can explain to me that a compression-less zip file be any slower
than the current setup.

With compression I could understand, but without I don't think any speed
difference would be noticeable. However, even with compression the
operation should be fairly fast. zip is not like a tar.gz or tar.bz2,
ie, you can read a file out of it and search through it fairly fast, and
you don't have to uncompress the entire archive to get a single file.

--Todd


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