[pacman-dev] alpm_list functions

[Xavier]

On Sat, Dec 01, 2007 at 11:43:19PM +0100, Nagy Gabor wrote:
> 
> +1
> And I was totally wrong, alpm_list_diff is SLOW, I thought that it uses
> a more clever algorithm <- so it doesn't sort anything [*], and
> alpm_list_diff(_alpm_db_get_pkgcache(db), dblist, _alpm_pkg_cmp) is
> also much slower than I expected.
> 

Ok, I found your previous mail a bit strange, I understand now.

> Some other notes:
> 1. Why pkgcache is sorted? Do we use this somewhere? Yes, sorted lists
> are more efficient, we can find or remove elements faster, but as I
> see, we don't assume anywhere that this is a sorted list [well, we call
> list_add_sorted in add_pkgincache, but this is slower then
> pkg_add_last ;-]. Probably no, and that's why you didn't know about
> this.
> 

Well, I'm confused. First you seemed to think it was a good idea to sort the
list at the base, and then use this for having more efficient functions.
And now, it seems like you are saying it's a bad idea...


> 2. I warn you, that alpm_list_intersect would be a funny function: that
> would be _asymmetric_, because we use a compare function for compare:
> In the example above:
> intersect(dbcache, joined) finds the to-be-modified local packages, but
> intersect(joined, dbcache) finds packages in the target which has old
> version installed, these are not the same!
> 

I don't understand this at all.

> 3. pointercmp and satisfycmp warning. These are NOT real compare
> functions, so you should NEVER use ptrcmp in a clever (like in
> check_fileconflicts) alpm_list_diff. Probably this is the main reason
> for [*]
> 

I don't understand this either. check_fileconflicts uses strcmp, what's the
problem with this?