Debian's sync may be nicer, but their client-side solution leaves a bit to be desired.
Trivial apt operations (e.g. trying to install a package which is already installed) on an NSLU2 (an ancient 266MHz ARM machine) take several minutes, whereas the same operation takes several seconds on a modern laptop.
It turns out this is due to the fact that Debian "main" (Packages.gz) has ballooned to 32MB of plain text when uncompressed, comprising more than 41,000 packages, and it has to be parsed and assembled into a dependency tree for every apt operation. This problem screams for SQLite.
A side project I've started looking into is to make a transparent apt proxy which provides a trimmed down Packages.gz (e.g., removing anything which uses X11), which would be a lot easier that rewriting apt to use a SQLite backend.
This is precisely why yum/dnf has been switching from XML for repodata to SQLite. In fact, the only thing that is still XML-only is the comps file which just lists package groups, is updated rarely and "only" weighs in at half a MB.
> Trivial apt operations (e.g. trying to install a package which is already installed) on an NSLU2 (an ancient 266MHz ARM machine) take several minutes
Actually, I'm surprised one can actually run a modern Linux on the NSLU2 given its shameful lack of RAM and slooow USB port. But it was a nice gadget when it came out and it was fun to experiment with it.
> It turns out this is due to the fact that Debian "main" (Packages.gz) has ballooned to 32MB of plain text when uncompressed, comprising more than 41,000 packages, and it has to be parsed and assembled into a dependency tree for every apt operation. This problem screams for SQLite.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't apt (and dpkg) basically composed out of a ton of different (perl/shellscript) modules? So it should be possible to create an interface-compatible sqlite data store.
It isn't just package search which is the problem, it is everything which has to parse the packages file, which is basically every apt command. So if you can trim "main" down to 10,000 packages, suddenly every part of apt is faster, and no one has to install any custom apt replacements.
Trivial apt operations (e.g. trying to install a package which is already installed) on an NSLU2 (an ancient 266MHz ARM machine) take several minutes, whereas the same operation takes several seconds on a modern laptop.
It turns out this is due to the fact that Debian "main" (Packages.gz) has ballooned to 32MB of plain text when uncompressed, comprising more than 41,000 packages, and it has to be parsed and assembled into a dependency tree for every apt operation. This problem screams for SQLite.
A side project I've started looking into is to make a transparent apt proxy which provides a trimmed down Packages.gz (e.g., removing anything which uses X11), which would be a lot easier that rewriting apt to use a SQLite backend.