On 9/14/07, Danek Duvall <danek.duvall at sun.com> wrote: > The big problem with any archive format is that it then requires that you > pull down the entire package, even if all you need from it is a file or > two.
It sounds as if you're planning on making radical alterations to the whole way in which software is managed. It sounds rather like Conary, actually. Are you managing dependencies at the level of individual files? This is hard enough for software you know about; it gets even harder for software you don't know about yet. If we need partial packages, it makes me wonder what problem we're trying to solve. > Our repository stores files individually, which eliminates that > issue -- you only ever pull exactly what you need to transition your system > to the package versions you've requested. How does this work without a repository? > (That said, downloading multiple > files has more transaction overhead; we want to download multiple files > from a package as a bundle, though we were investigating MIME, I believe, > for that operation. Krister will have to fill you in on that.) Nothing I suggested precludes what you're describing here. In fact, this sounds suspiciously like the way patches deliver partial packages in signed jar files. > The downside with zip in particular is that the table of contents is at the > end of the file, which means that you can't do anything with it until > you've finished downloading it. Yes, but you wouldn't want to do a software transaction until you actually had all the data to hand. (If you're pulling this from a repository, metadata operations could be done independently.) > This may not be a huge issue if we depend on anything but https for > security measures -- you'll want to verify the whole thing before you > install it -- but it may limit streaming. Like you point out, zip has a > whole lot of nice properties in terms of being a common format, but I've > never understood this particular design decision. > > Danek -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
