Hi, Guillem and Lars, thank you very much for your detailed replies. They are really informative and encouraging.
>From your replies what I learned was that, the idea is quite complex and instead of streaming, we can think of other ways of speeding up the installation process, which has taken my idea to a new direction. As you have pointed out, I will also look into the possibilities of using self-contained batches and debdeltas with apt/dpkg in the speeding up process. But still, the streaming idea also looks interesting to me. I will study apt/dpkg functionality and streaming technologies in more detail and try to come up with a suggestion on it. What I feel is, we can use a tree like structure to resolve the dependencies and use it in the streaming process in some way to achieve our goal. I am not sure if it's doable or not. But I would like to develop the idea on top of this. I will let you know if I could come up with something interesting. I really appreciate your help. Thank you. On 1/6/11, Lars Wirzenius <[email protected]> wrote: > On ke, 2011-01-05 at 07:01 +0100, Guillem Jover wrote: >> Something which I guess would speed up the installation process could >> be to just make apt download the packages in self-contained batches, >> which can be unpacked/configured independently. This would also not >> really need any change in dpkg AFAICS. This way the installation >> process could start sooner than having to wait for the whole thing to >> get downloaded. It does not remove the need to store those batched >> packages on disk, but still. > > I can't look up the URLs for this, but when I worked for Canonical we > discussed something like this at one UDS, and there should be blueprints > and wiki pages on the Ubuntu sites for this. Some searching should turn > them up. > > From memory, what we came up with was basically what Guillem hints at: > > * apt will order its downloads in "installation order" > * whenever apt has a self-contained batch, it will feed them to dpkg > * while dpkg runs, apt will continue to download things in the > background > > Further, we discussed the possibility of doing some of the dpkg > installation phases in parallel, even while waiting for the rest of a > batch to be downloaded: for example, unpacking might be possible already > at that time. This is more error prone and more complicated, though. > > Related to these discussions we also discussed the possibility of > speeding up downloads by using debdeltas. debdelta seems to work quite > well, and it might be a good idea for Debian to adopt it officially. > > -- > Blog/wiki/website hosting with ikiwiki (free for free software): > http://www.branchable.com/ > > -- Regards, Ishan Jayawardena. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
