[packagekit] Inviting you to project "PackageMap"

[Richard Hughes]

 On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 8:42 AM, Sebastian
Pipping<webmaster at hartwork.org> wrote:
> To do such mapping we need code (or a "service") that does the mapping
> for us and base of collected data that the service can operate on.  Both
> of these is project "PackageMap"

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 also worried that a package manager has to read in and parse
thousands of small files. Why did you decide to write each project as
a single xml file?

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. 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 agree with the concept, but not the implementation. All you're
trying to provide is a packagename <-> ID database. XML might be
useful for storing the data, but not for querying.

Richard.