[arch-general] Ye Olde Package Manager

[Brendan Long]

On 01/16/2011 08:16 AM, solsTiCe d'Hiver wrote:
> You failed to mention than tar file are always compressed so this adds a
> layer of failure.
tar files are generally used in compression, but they do have other
purposes. In this case the tar file is being used for the sole purpose
of grouping files. Pacman's bad performance in some cases is because it
has to read thousands of tiny text files. Putting those tiny text files
in an uncompressed tar greatly improves performance just by reducing the
number of random reads.