[packagekit] Inviting you to project "PackageMap"

[Sebastian Pipping]

Richard Hughes wrote:
> I'm slightly worried about it being called a service. Is it going to
> be a new process that just does the mapping or is this a bad choice of
> words? If it is a new process then I'm not sure such a thing will
> catch on.

I'm not yet sure about how a mapper will keep it's data
fresh as the use of it is dependent on that.
Ignore my "service" for now.


> I'm also worried that a package manager has to read in and parse
> thousands of small files.

While you mention "package manager" - with the current concept
the data will not be precise enough for use with a package manager.


> Why did you decide to write each project as
> a single xml file?

 - The other 99% of the database stay valid XML if a single
   file is invalid

 - To better fit the version controlled environment


> Parsing and reading 10,000 files (in multiple directories) might take
> a few seconds, and would have to be copied into memory (few Mb) to
> query quickly.

Correct.


> Which has to be invalidated if any of the files or
> directories change. Why didn't you just put them in a sqlite database
> that can be queried in a few ms, without dragging in an xml parser?
> Also 10,000 files take up way more space (and takes longer to install
> and update) than a single database file.

I like your idea about sqlite.  Maybe keeping the data to edit XML
and query and sqlite export snapshot is something to try.


> XML might be
> useful for storing the data, but not for querying.

Good point.



Sebastian