New FreeBSD package system (a.k.a. Daemon Package System (dps))

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Ivan Voras <ivoras at fer.hr> writes:
> des@ mentioned putting metadata info at the front of the file - I
> don't see how this would help. The most common operation with binary
> packages *over the network* is "pkg_add -r", which will need to read
> it whole anyway, and it would help greatly for things such as
> installers from CD media. (Querying a bunch of packages over the
> network for their properties, one by one, is not a good idea, but it
> is on a local media).

Having the metadata in front means you don't need to store a temporary
copy of the package in memory or on disk; you extract the metadata in
memory, and the rest of the package directly in its final location.

AFAIK, pkg_create makes sure that +CONTENTS is always the first file in
the archive, precisely to make this possible.  The fact that pkg_add
doesn't take advantage of it is a bug.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no