Previously Michal Kosek wrote: > I have the feeling that dpkg hasn't been designed to hold as many > packages as there are in Debian today -- it keeps everything in large, > non-indexed text files.
That's quite an understatement :) > In this case a complete rewrite probably would be the best solution. > But, as I found in Debian archives, there were people who wanted make > dpkgv2 since 1999, and I there have been no results :) So I decided to > find solutions to things that are the most annoying for me: I've come to realize that we can accomplish all the goals from dpkg2 by making incremental changes to the existing codebase, which is imho a better approach. > - There should be no such thing as /var/lib/dpkg/available -- I think > that dpkg shouldn't know anything about not installed packages. Right. > - Parsing of /var/lib/dpkg/status also takes a lot of time, so there > should be some better way of storing that information. As putting it > into binary database might be controversial, I thought that splitting > that file would be the best solution -- every installed package should > have its own *.status file in /var/lib/dpkg/info directory. This > makes recreating of original status file (for backward compatibility) > very simple: just That is an option, but I think we need to make a different change: instead of a single status file it should be split up into a file with information that is needed to resolve dependencies, and a seperate file that contains 'fluff' such as package descriptions, maintainer information, etc. That will be http://www.dpkg.org/dep/003/, but it needs to be fleshed out yet (currently only dep 004 has been specified). > - There should be ability to make more complicated queries. I like > grep-dctrl very much. I also think that many features may be taken > from rpm... dpkg-query is supposed to become such a query tool. At the moment it only adds the showformat stuff. The next interesting change would be a good filter expression so you can tell it which packages to output, but I haven't been able to come up with a good syntax for that so far. Wichert. -- Wichert Akkerman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> It's hard to make things simple. http://www.wiggy.net/
