[pacman-dev] Database consistency checking (hash tables)

[Xavier]

On Fri, Jul 20, 2007 at 11:09:55PM +0200, Xavier wrote:
> But that really sucks of course :( I hate C.. There is really no clean way
> to do what I want?
> I guess I could create a new pkg structure type only for that testdb file,
> for storing the new requiredby field, or having a second local pkgcache
> (duplicating every package and storing them in a list, and modifying the
>  requiredy field there).
> But the code is already huge compared to the simple things it does.
> It would make it even more huge :p
> 

What I would have done in Java is probably using a HashMap.
So I did the same in C, I took the implementation of hash tables from there :
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~cwc22/hashtable/
and used that instead of my previous newrequiredby hack for storing the new
requiredby fields :)
The problem is that the hashtable implementation is bigger than the testdb.c
file itself..

But couldn't hash tables also be useful for the rest of the code?
Having O(1) access to elements instead of the O(n) _alpm_pkg_find() for
example could be interesting in some cases in my opinion.