Hello, I have been playing with the idea of speeding up pacman for a little while. This is my first try. It's a binary database that uses a ternary search tree to speedup file lookup and package lookup. The result can be found at http://owwsnap.com/sarcina-0.0.1.tar.gz. To compile it you need to run the normal ./configure && make, but you would probably want to edit src/sarcina.c and change the hardcoded paths. If you're running a new version of pacman (3.1 or something) you probably need to change libsarc/sarc.c:505: db_local = alpm_db_register("local"); into alpm_option_set_dbpath("/var/lib/pacman/"); db_local = alpm_db_register_local(); I see you have discussed the database question several times. I hope this code could give you some answers (is a binary database really faster etc). To run this program you first need to build the database using sarcina -u. Then you can: - find who owns a file (sarcina -o file) - list files that are outdated (sarcina -s) - "install" a package (sarcina -i package). This is pretty much just a proof-of-concept, so don't expect it to do much, but I think it might be a start. Sivert