> 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.
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.