file dependencies and packages and [blocker] bugs

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le lundi 03 mars 2008 à 14:56 -0800, Andrew Farris a écrit :
> Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > Anyway the whole argument stinks. Yes filelists make transactions
> > slower. However these particular file deps will only cause the file
> > lists to be pulled when one of the aforementionned badly coded marginaly
> > used games is installed or updated so
> > 1. this won't happen for the vast majority of users or updates
> 
> Yes you're right my prior email was a bit broad, but the game packages may not 
> be the only ones doing something of this nature with filedeps that could be avoided.
> 
> > 2. the costs are paid by the users of the problem packages
> 
> No, the 'costs' are paid by mirrors serving bandwidth for users with those 
> packages installed.

Server-side it's the same whether you serve a volume of data as part of
a package or as part of a filelist. What annoys Seth is volumes served
as part of filelists are counted in the "yum is slow" column, while the
same volumes served as part of packages are counted in the "packages are
bloated" column.

However dependencies are the heart of a package system, and by trying to
ban a kind of dep which is widely used in the rpm word you're not making
yum/rpm as fast as apt/deb you're making it as annoyingly limited.

Now, the problem with file deps is not that they exist but that the
complete filelists are huge and limiting file lists to some filesystem
areas does not really work (or we wouldn't have this discussion, and
remember the rpm/Fedora ecosystem is not limited to Fedora packages even
if the filedep purge succeeded Fedora-side)

Therefore, instead of periodically trying to eradicate file deps (which
meets some opposition), why not try to make the file deps *as* *used*
*within* *Fedora* fast? Alternative packager-friendly solutions would
be:

1. to split the huge filelist in several files of increasing size and
decreasing use probability (the multiple levels of cache strategy)

2. to add an hint in rpm so packages can mark a particular file as being
likely to be depended on by other stuff, regardless to his position in
the filesystem (and move the resulting provides with other first-class
metadata). This addresses the 2000¹ fonts is too much and
-ENOCRISTALBALL concerns (this could also be used to seriously prune the
stuff in /etc we store as privileged metadata)

There are probably other solutions that do not require limiting our
current package manager feature set to improve some numbers.

¹ Didn't bother to check this number

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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