redhat abe

[seth vidal]

> The exercise is to attempt a method in which you save computation of md5 
> or sha1, as these are one of the time consuming steps of createrepo.  
> The save would be in a 100k package repository: (100,000 - N) * 
> Time(sum_calc), where N equals the number of packages that *need* to 
> generate sums for. A parameterized list of package names passed into 
> createrepo would be sufficient to figure out what composes the N list.  
> An external process, such as a Manifest list, would then be used to 
> mitigate a set of packages through the entire build process.  Apt uses 
> a md5sum cache, but having fine-tuned controlled of the process would 
> be more stable and directed. This is how much saving you'd get for #2.

Let me know when you've figured it out but as it stands I don't think
incrementally updating the metadata is very feasible.

-sv