Brian Smith wrote: > What specifically are the types of queries that need to be fast? I know of > "packages with <substring> in their name that are installable on this > system", "packages that have updates available that are installed on this > system", "packages that depend on <X>, where <X> is installed on this > system," "packages on which <X> depends," and "all packages with security > updates." What other queries need to be optimized for pkg(5)? In particular, > what is the use case for boolean searches? Does pkg(5) needs to be able to > answer full-text searches over package descriptions without contacting the > server? If so, why? > In general, yes we want search to be able to answer local queries locally. This is both so that functionality doesn't vanish when not connected to the server, and to try to minimize our bandwidth usage.
The use case I have for our internal usage for boolean searches is "find me a package with file X in incorporation Y". In general I think the approach of predicting what users are going to search for isn't the right way to go. Unless there's a reason we can't do full text local search, I think we should. Also, several of your potential queries aren't things that search has the information to answer. I'm not saying we shouldn't provide that information, but pkg search is a search of package information. Maybe we'll want to change that in the future, but that's outside the current specs. > Shawn mentioned that disk space usage isn't a concern. I agree that the > package server should be able to throw disk space at the problem if > necessary. But, a 40MB index is way too big for the client. > > Well 40MB is still better than 240MB. If you want it to be fast, as many, many people have told us they do, some stored pre-computation is necessary. The good news if if that's too big for you, simply remove the index and use the older, slower search. Why would 40MB of disk space be too much to use? That's a sample on my machine, which has about 700 packages installed on it. Those packages take enough space that I'd expect 40MB to be down in the noise. Brock > Regards, > Brian > > > _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
