On Fri, 30 Aug 2002, Martin Quinson wrote: > [snip]
I won't discuss the details of your message, but here are some generic ideas I have been playing with that will help your situation. I have recently been doing lots of memory reduction tweaks to dpkg. Currently, dpkg-query -S dpkg takes 48% less memory in my work dir, then the one in /usr/bin. While, that doesn't immediately help you, I have thought about making description fields handled specially. Instead of dpkg storing the text of the description field in memory, it would store a reference to a file, and start/stop offsets. In the dpkg-query -S case, this would 430k. In the dpkg-query -l case, it'd said 4.6m. Because of this large mem savings, it may well be worth doing. Once that is done, it's relativly easy to have alternate descriptions made available, and very little cost.
