Andreas Hanke
[...] This makes me seriously doubt that rpm-md is designed or even suitable for such huge repositories. It's not surprising that parsing this beast is slow, even with a fast parser. It also makes me doubt that improving the parser is the only way of approaching the problem.
I agree with this conclusion. xml is nice but it shows it limits here.
So I thought how to reduce the number of packages:
- Separate repositories per architecture - not possible because SUSE repositories have always been multiarch.
We could - no problem at all. It would increase the space since all source and noarch packages would need to be duplicated. We love to have one ;-)
- Separate repositories for source packages - bad idea IMHO.
- Reducing the number of packages - not possible, people want to have more software and not less.
The debuginfo packages sounded like a reasonable candidate to me because their number is always proportional to the number of binary packages. If we get a new architecture like ia64, we get more debuginfo packages as well, which means we can also save proportionally by splitting them from the rest.
Note also that we already have performance workarounds. Using the old susetags metadata instead of rpm-md during initial installation is one of them.
Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, aj@suse.de, http://www.suse.de/~aj/ SUSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126