[haiku-development] Re: Package manager
- From: Brecht Machiels <brecht@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:15:21 +0000
Axel Dörfler wrote:
Stephan Assmus <superstippi@xxxxxx> wrote:
If decent performance can be maintained after quite a few packages
have
been installed, is the big question here. And I have strong doubts
that it
can be achieved. Maybe it's possible with "caching", similar to what
the
"real" fs does by storing things on-disk. Like an on-disk file system
on
top of another on-disk filesystem, but still separate. If it would be
done
all on the fly, I just cannot imagine it would be fast enough.
Why shouldn't it? It's just a matter of how to store/cache the
information. A "real" file system doesn't do anything else, anyway, and
file systems like NTFS support transparent compression - as long as
block based access is possible, it shouldn't slow down the machine a
lot (as you also need to retrieve less data from disk), while it's
definitely more CPU intensive than just reading the data.
If you are making things this complicated, you have to ask yourself: Is
installing really such a bad thing? Installing would simply extract the
bundle's contents (be it an uncompressed image or plain files) to the
hard disk without bothering the user for the rest. This is a one-time
operation, and is a lot more efficient than what you describe above. It
is also a lot more transparent.
When a bundle has been extracted, it can still be mapped into a common
directory hierarchy if you wish to do so. pkgfs for images, or assignfs
for plain files.
These extracted bundles can always be archived up again if needed.
If the format we chose is not suitable for GB large games, then I guess
we may want to refine it in like 20 years when the first of those are
actually available for Haiku ;-)
Can we at least try to get it right the first time?
Regards,
Brecht
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