[pacman-dev] Tar backend for local db

[Allan McRae]

I was thinking about the local database backend in pacman and how we
could improve it.

The tar-based backed for sync dbs have been quite a success.  Ever since
we did that, I have been wanting to do the same with the local database.
 But there were two issues:

1) tar is not designed for removing and updating files in place

2) with a directory/files per package structure, we are quite robust to
corruption as a single file effects only a single package.


Well...  I have a cunning plan...  How about we do both!


Have the local database in a tarball but also extracted.  All reading is
done from the tarball, so -Q operations would be fast due to not require
reading from lots of small files.  With an operation that
adds/removes/updates a package, the local database is still read from
the tarball, but the modifications are done on the files backend and
then the tarball is recreated at the end.  We could even be efficient
during the recreation and read all the old files from the old tarball
and only read the new files from the filesystem (which will be in the
kernel cache...).

This would also give another use for "pacman -D" - an option could be
added to recreate the local db tarball - in case it became corrupt or
the files were manually edited.


What do people think?