[pacman-dev] [PATCH] pmdb_t: allow repo names to be longer than 128 chars

[Aurelien Foret]

VMiklos wrote:
> hi
> 
> http://darcs.frugalware.org/darcsweb/darcsweb.cgi?r=pacman;a=plain_commitdiff;h=20060318163042-e2957-462fecda64593bced52cad44914ce5ae66f1dbee.gz;
> 
> any reason for limiting the length of the repo names? i would suggest increase
> the limit to PATH_MAX

PATH_MAX is usually 4096 bytes, which is quite huge compared to the 
actual needs.
DB_TREENAME_LEN is 128 bytes which is already ways too much (64 or even 
32 would be enough): treename is only a directory name and not a 
complete path (like root+dbpath+treename).

I concede the library is not manipulating lots of pmdb_t structs, but I 
don't see the need to increase by about 4Kb the size of each instance of it.

BTW, I was even thinking to reduce the memory footprint of pacman by 
using shorter fields in the pmpkg_t struct.
For instance, 512 bytes is quite big for the package description length, 
whereas the package guidelines are recommending 80 bytes at most.

Knowing that there are about 1700 packages in extra, it means loading 
the cache will allocate 1700*512=870Kb (only for package 
descriptions!!!), whereas maybe only 1700*100=170Kb are actually needed.

I think it would be interesting to collect statistics of fields length 
from packages in our repositories in order to fine tune the pmpkg_t 
structure fields size (mainly for name, version, desc, url and packager)...

Or we may use dynamically allocated fields, if it does not slow down the 
library too much...
-- 
Aurelien