Results of the App Installer Meeting

[Enrico Zini]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 05:24:24PM +0100, Samuel Verschelde wrote:

> > How well can the xapian indexes be appended to w/o remaking the whole
> > kit and kaboodle? I'm mostly wondering if the indexes and/or metadata
> > can be sensibly delta'd
> 
> I don't know, apparently on debian systems they update it without pain when 
> metadata are updated from the mirrors, I guess you can add or remove things 
> from the index (which is built locally from what I understood). Enrico Zini 
> from debian can probably answer better than me (or the xapian website:)) when 
> he's back from his trip.

At the moment, after downloading the new version of the metadata, we:

 1. perform a quick incremental upgrade, reindexing only those packages
    for which the available version has changed;
 2. weekly we do a full index rebuild, to make sure even packages that
    haven't had metadata changes in a long time get refreshed.

Point 2 isn't needed if the entire set of package metadata is tied to
the package version. Some kinds of metadata (popularity and tags,
currently) however are not, because they keep being updated even if the
package isn't, and the weekly rebuild takes care of that.

This means that a package which hasn't had a new version in the last
week can have popularity and tag information that is up to a week old
(but not more). We consider it a more than acceptable tradeoff.


Ciao,

Enrico

-- 
GPG key: 4096R/E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <enrico at enricozini.org>
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