Proposed F13 feature: drop separate updates repository

[James Antill]

On Wed, 2009-12-02 at 17:46 -0500, Peter Jones wrote:
> (on my on tangent...)
> 
> On 12/02/2009 12:48 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
> > I hypothesize that we could place all rpms for a given release
> > in a single directory (seth will hate this as he wants to split them up
> > based on first letter of their name for better filesystem performance),
> 
> Ugh, first letter isn't really a great plan anyway.

 It's not "great" but it's better than the current "all in one dir." and
easy to do, and I haven't heard of any downsides (that aren't applicable
to "all in one dir.").

>  First (few) letters
> of a hash of the filename is much better, but obviously hurts browsability.

 Right, which is important enough to not do that IMO. I'm sure Jesse
wouldn't like finding packages to mean using find.

> Next best is probably something like how a dead-tree dictionary index works;
> list everything, split the list up by starting letters evenly, so the
> directories (given a really unlikely hypothetical package set) are 
> 
> 0/	# contains packages named 0 through 3*
> 4/	# 4 through 9*
> a/	# a through ay*
> az/	# az through bw*
> bx/	# bx through cz*
> da/	# da through whatever's next
> ...
> 
> so that every directory has about the same number of things.

 This should be fairly easy to code, but has a big downside:

 Packages will move directories.

        1. This will upset yum (old repo. MD == no packages download).
        2. This might upset mirrors.
        3. This will probably upset users:
                i. URLs will only be safe until the next mash, they
                won't even be able to bookmark <prefix>/y if they just
                want to see yum each time.
                ii. Users have to look/parse the directory layout each
                time they visit to see what "blah" is.

-- 
James Antill - james at fedoraproject.org
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