On 22 April, 2006 - Dave Miner sent me these 0,4K bytes: > Casper.Dik at Sun.COM wrote: > ... > >Since I feel package installation is a rare event, we really need to > >optimize for the standard operations and not the install/upgrade. > >The latter can be optimized in different ways.
Just talking for myself, I'd say that I've used pkgchk to look for files a handful times (if it takes 0.5 seconds or 1.5 seconds, I couldn't care less).. Installing machines - many hundred times (not to talk about patching which is a great pain too since it has the same slowness), and while installing - pkgadd etc is run about a thousand times for a full install... > Bingo. If you want fast installation, something like a flash archive > seems likely to be the clear performance winner over anything you might > do to optimize package operations. But flash archives are hard to manage.. You have to install a system the way you want and then take a copy of it.. if you made some error, you have to start the manual process all over again.. Why should there be a huge speed difference of unpacking one huge archive (flash) compared to a bunch of small ones (regular packages) ? They're doing just about the same thing in the end... If the bottom line is 'many files' vs 'one file', why not have both? During install/patching, tell pkgadd to do 'many files' to avoid rewriting the entire file a thousand times and when the install is over you (install program) can merge it back to the old contents files.. For single pkgadds, rewriting it isn't nice, but multiplied by 1000 it will take a significant amount of time.. /Tomas
