New FreeBSD package system (a.k.a. Daemon Package System (dps))

Stanislav Sedov stas at FreeBSD.org
Sat May 12 11:52:14 UTC 2007


On Fri, 11 May 2007 02:10:05 +0200
Ivan Voras <ivoras at fer.hr> mentioned:

> - I think it's time to give up on using BDB+directory tree full of text
> files for storing the installed packages database, and I propose all of
> this be replaced by a single SQLite database. SQLite is public domain
> (can be slurped into base system), embeddable, stores all data in a
> single file, lightweight, fast, and can be used to do fancy things such
> as reporting.

What is the reason to use SQL-based database? You'll perform direct
queries to database? The packaging system is for ordinal users, not sql
geeks, so they should not have to use sql for managing packages. So a
simple set of hashes will suffer or needs. I agree with Julian that we
should have a backup of packaging database in plain text format, and
utility to rebuild it. This way we can always restore the database if
something goes wrong. Furhtermore, that should not make a great impact
on performance, since we don't have to rebuild it every day.

>
> - A quick test confirms that the current bsdtar will happily ignore any
> extra data at the end of a tgz/tbz archive, so package metadata can be
> embedded there, thus conserving existing infrastructure and being fast
> to parse. I suggest encoding this metadata in a sane and easy to parse
> XML structure.
>
> I cannot currently actively participate in implementing proposed things,
> but I can give advice on sqlite, database and xml schemas if anyone
> wants to...
>

Why use XML for that? It's hard to parse and hard to read format, and I
personally see no benefits of using it. If you're suggesting XML a
simple bracket-structure format (like bind's config) will fit our needs
much better (easier to parse and read and same benefits as XML). Also
we might consider YAML, thought I like this idea much fewer.

--
Stanislav Sedov
ST4096-RIPE
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