Thank you (and everyone else) who responded. A couple of thoughts: Cfengine is neat, and it would solve my problems. I've been sort of wary of learning to use it, though, because it aims to push all your concerns into one universal file, and because the syntax and semantics vary by section. Perhaps that's an impractical reaction. I'll definitely look into it some more.
I've set up a local mirror of x86 main, and this does help some. I'll look into mirroring more or mirroring more selectively. On Mon, 7 Oct 2002, Adam Heath wrote: > The access patterns in both apt and dpkg are not simple to give different > backends. One of the threads referenced before included a link to an announcement about "DpkgV2": http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/1999/debian-devel-announce-199907/msg00012.html Some of the goals seem to be addressed in woody (multiple frontends, debconf configuration management), but I can't find evidence of the backend changes (ie, using .so modules liberally). Was it decided that this would be too difficult? > dpkg in head has several memory tweaks. Before I had started working on them, > dpkg would take 16-20 megs of memory to install a package. After I was done, > it was taking 5-6 megs. Most of that being the file database. And, I have > plans to make that mmap capable. Wow. I guess we really put a lot of stress on APT and dpkg. My woody PPC box indicates that it's got about 8500 packages available to it, and I suppose that number gets larger on x86, on testing, on unstable, on hosts that pull packages from multiple distributions. I'm impressed that apt-get does its thing so quickly. Oh, well. Again, thanks for the replies. I've got some things to look into now. - Tim
