Results of the App Installer Meeting

[seth vidal]

On Thu, 2011-01-27 at 15:36 +0100, Samuel Verschelde wrote:
> Le jeudi 27 janvier 2011 15:30:31, Richard Hughes a écrit :
> > On 27 January 2011 13:53, Samuel Verschelde <stormi at laposte.net> wrote:
> > > Another way to do it without making the xml file grow too much would be
> > > to have one xml file containing only package descriptions per language.
> > > It uses some space on mirrors, but not that much (especially because the
> > > number of applications is really smaller than the number of packages).
> > 
> > I thought we agreed it would be better to have all the languages in
> > one file, rather than having 130 files all with a few k of text
> > inside? Lots of tiny files really hurts read and write performance.
> > (130*number of repos installed = thousands)
> > 
> 
> Another thing to keep in mind is that users usually use only 2 languages on 
> their computers : their mothertongue and english when there's nothing better 
> available.
> 
> So having lots of files may be a pain for repository managers, but not on 
> client side where only 2 files will be downloaded usually (the common xml file + 
> his languages descriptions), if we adopt such an approach.
> 

1. inodes are not much of an issue for mirrors anymore

2. downloading lots of smaller files is improved if you're using
keepalives. A lot of mirrors honor them, not all. ftp is.... 'odd' in
many cases with trying to hold the connection open. It's one of the many
reasons I don't like using ftp for mirrors.

-sv