>Just talking for myself, I'd say that I've used pkgchk to look for files >a handful times (if it takes 0.5 seconds or 1.5 seconds, I couldn't care >less).. Installing machines - many hundred times (not to talk about >patching which is a great pain too since it has the same slowness), and >while installing - pkgadd etc is run about a thousand times for a full >install...
We're talking 1 second versus 30 seconds. That is, I think, a serious problem. And we're not arguing that the contents file must be present at all times during installation; it's easy to see how that can be done differently. >Why should there be a huge speed difference of unpacking one huge >archive (flash) compared to a bunch of small ones (regular packages) ? >They're doing just about the same thing in the end... Quite. >If the bottom line is 'many files' vs 'one file', why not have both? >During install/patching, tell pkgadd to do 'many files' to avoid >rewriting the entire file a thousand times and when the install is over >you (install program) can merge it back to the old contents files.. For >single pkgadds, rewriting it isn't nice, but multiplied by 1000 it will >take a significant amount of time.. There are many ways to skin that cat; but having two repositories may mean that they're out of sync. Casper
