On 10/23/2016 01:41 AM, Alive 4ever wrote:
Also consider the fact that your pacman database is one of the least likely pieces of data to target for the sake of noticeably improving your computer's overall performance.
Yeah, I am aware of it. Hardware components tend to degrade over time, especially mechanical hard drive.
What part of "least likely pieces of *data*" was not obvious enough in its reference to *data*, such that you felt the need to conflate data with hardware?
If you are agreeing with me ("Yeah, I am aware of it") then stop mentioning hardware. If you are arguing with me, then please explain what you actually meant to say and what it has to do with hardware.
... Back to the subject, I wanted to propose my idea on how to speed up
On Sun, Oct 23, 2016 at 01:57:23AM -0400, Eli Schwartz via arch-general wrote: pacman local database access - regardless of the hardware. Some folks replied with something like ``there is no need for this, just go get an ssd``, which is misleading. I post the idea here as suggestion for pacman local database improvement, not as complaint on slow filesystem access on mechanical drive.
I am still pretty sure that whatever problem you may have, it is not pacman-specific and it doesn't require a pacman-specific tool.
So while you might disagree with the political commentary invoked in that commit message, the general idea that the script is a waste of space is something I can get behind!
While using sql for pacman database could potentially provide faster access to local database, there is a risk of database corruption that isn't easy to recover. Current approach of using smaller files for databases also has its own advantage as gsnijder explained.
One really big advantage of this approach is that you don't have to worry about corrupted databases. It's been a while since I used an RPM based distro, but it always surprised me how quickly the db would fall over and needed to be rebuilt. The beauty of the Arch approach is it's robust simplicity. And yes, there are/were wrappers that use a SQL DB for specific operations. If such a db gets problems, there is nothing to worry about: pacman just keeps working anyway.
I'll leave it to developers to take whichever methods for pacman local database.