Control: reopen -1 On Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 07:10:34PM +0000, Ivan Shmakov wrote: > A proper solution would be to move to some file format that > allows in-place updates, such as Berkeley DB or SQLite.
No it would not be. The best we can do, and maybe should do is move pkgcache.bin to /run. In-place updates means _a lot_ of things can go wrong. Like you forget to delete packages that are no longer in the repository. There's also no way to change this in any case, the database format is an integral part of the public API, it would take decade(s) to switch to anything else. Unfortunately I only thought about moving pkgcache.bin to /run directly after sending the close email, but I think that might be a reasonable compromise to discuss, and if we support $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/apt/pkgcache.bin as well, then that would even get us caching for non-root users. How to move that file out of /var/cache/apt is going to be a tricky question, as that location is to some extend part of the API as well - people might set Dir::Cache to /tmp/apt and expect pkgcache.bin to end up in /tmp/apt. With regards to srcpkgcache.bin, which represents the available packages, but no installed packages (pkgcache.bin is built from it by adding the dpkg status file in-place, in-memory, and then writing it back out), I think having that around after a reboot is what we want such that you don't need to rebuild the entire cache each boot. -- debian developer - deb.li/jak | jak-linux.org - free software dev ubuntu core developer i speak de, en
