Hi, I'm picking this up from opensuse-packaging, where I'm not subscribed, so I cannot follow up there, but it fits better on the zypp-devel list anyway. I wanted to give my feedback about a feature which was suggested. In suse.lists.opensuse-packaging, Lukas wrote:
Are a few minutes installation time really that important? Sure it's 50% according to your numbers but it's still minutes. Has anyone actually tried to optimize the traditional installation method? Like preloading rpms or reorder them on the medium to avoid seeks on the cdrom? Reordering RPMs should be done according to dependencies but libzypp=20 solver can 'randomize' them a bit ;)
There are some more important features that would make the traditional=20 installation method faster:
* Downloading and Installation in more threads (installation of RPM doesn't block downloading)
In principle a fine idea, and I had something like that in mind for a long time myself, however: To *reliably* avoid brokenness of the system in case the download can't complete (network outage, packages don't match the metadata or similar), it is *obligatory* to me (admin viewpoint) to first completely download all packages, before starting to install them. Therefore I prefer the "yum" method: download all packages, then try (in a test transaction) whether updating/installing them works, then apply. For these reasons, I would be careful with parallel downloads. Of course, if libzypp doesn't do that anyway, it could at least download the next package while still installing another one. Would be a nice improvement for our users.
* Installing more RPMs at once. (a lot of small RPMs have to initialize RPM database, lock it, unlock it..., and again...)
This is actually what yum does. Peter