Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: The fallacies of GLEP55

[Richard Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

Duncan wrote:
> So I believe the cost to be quite reasonably managed, after all.  
> Benchmarks would of course be needed to demonstrate that, but I believe 
> it worth pursuing.
> 

Agreed.  Perhaps I'm just spoiled by RDBMS's at work or something, but 
it seems like we're trying to squeeze every ounce of speed out of a 
non-indexed flat file database and do everything we can to avoid 
actually putting all that metadata in something that actually is 
queryable no matter how lousy the final design ends up being.

Expressing the package database as a set of flat files works nicely - 
especially with cvs/git/etc.  Actually working with that data directly 
on a real system doesn't make sense at all.  Index it once and then only 
open the flat files on the rare occasion that you actually need to 
install one of them.  Such an index can be centrally distributed, or it 
could be maintained as packages are rsynced (and of course users should 
be able to update it on demand as well).

When the speed of your package management system depends on the 
performance of find vs grep -r, you are doing something wrong.  Neither 
works all that well.