[Draft] New debtags update algorithm

Enrico Zini enrico at enricozini.org
Thu Aug 31 15:50:21 UTC 2006


Hello,

 1) The current debtags update system is bad, and needs that obnoxious
    apt-index-watcher that we all hate
 2) I personally and deeply hate the fetcher API in libapt-pkg

So, this is a draft of a new system:

 1. Define source directories as directory where tag databases and
    vocabularies can be found.  Allow to have more than one, and
    especially allow users to have their own ones.
 2. Have separate tools to keep the source directories updated, by
    fetching files from the internet, generating things locally or
    whatever else people will like.
 3. Keep an index in /var/lib/debtags, but read instead an index in
    ~/.debtags if there are user changes
 4. When the library is initialised, check if there are newer files in
    the sources directory, and if yes, rebuild the index.  If it's
    running as root, rebuild the central index, otherwise rebuild the
    user index.
 5. No maintaining a separate patch anymore: PatchedCollection is slow.
    Instead, save the modified index in the home directory, and extract
    patches by diffing against the database in /var/lib.

I put it down in the mail to clear my mind a bit about it.  Now I'll see
if I can implement it.


Ciao,

Enrico

-- 
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico at debian.org>
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