Hi Daniel, Daniel Hartwig wrote: > On 9 January 2013 05:55, Axel Beckert <[email protected]> wrote: > > If I set Acquire::GzipIndexes to "true" in apt.conf, remove all files > > from /var/lib/apt/lists/ and run "apt-get update" again, the downloaded > > files don't get uncompressed but stay in compressed form on disk. > > These indices (Packages files mainly) are part of APTs database and > contain much information that is not present in the binary cache. While > apt-get performs fine with this setting, aptitude frequently accesses > package fields that are not in the binary cache and wants for > uncompressed access to the indices.
I see. > > I though don't expect that this causes the obvious speed difference > > between with and without Acquire::GzipIndexes, so I suspect it's some > > decompression which slows down selecting packages in the TUI. > > > > So maybe it can cache the information gathered at the first time read or > > read all the information into memory on startup (which would likely > > raise memory consumption which would be not ideal either). > > I believe that synaptic does something like this as part of converting > the data to a form suitable for GTK+ to use. However, implementing > such caching above the APT level is a major burden from a maintenance > perspective. Indeed, also because other tools have way worse issues with that setting, e.g. http://bugs.debian.org/617856 > Better to do this in APT, [...] *nod* Reassigning, affects aptitude and downgrading to wishlist? > Given the ease of configuring this setting appropriately I doubt > anyone will be interested in implementing “on-demand” caching of > the uncompressed data. *nod* > This setting is really for situations where programs such as > aptitude are not used, and the extra MBs of disk space are > important. Here I disagree. These things are not mutually exclusive. If there wasn't #617856, I may have reported this much earlier (*), because on my EeePC with just 4 GB of hard-wired disk space, I'd be very happy about that 87 MB more disk space I'd have if I could use that feature. There are also a few boxes which run on CF cards with 512 MB to 2 GB where I'm happy about every MB I can spare without compensating in features. (*) I mostly reported it because http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=317841#10 looks a lot like this and I didn't want to close #317841 (which was definitely a different issue) without giving that commenter's issue a proper bug report. Regards, Axel -- ,''`. | Axel Beckert <[email protected]>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/ : :' : | Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin `. `' | 1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486 202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE `- | 4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329 6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5 _______________________________________________ Aptitude-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aptitude-devel
