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

[Ivan Voras]

Stanislav Sedov wrote:
> On Fri, 11 May 2007 02:10:05 +0200
> Ivan Voras <ivoras at fer.hr> mentioned:
> 
>> - I think it's time to give up on using BDB+directory tree full of text
>> files for storing the installed packages database, and I propose all of
>> this be replaced by a single SQLite database. SQLite is public domain
>> (can be slurped into base system), embeddable, stores all data in a
>> single file, lightweight, fast, and can be used to do fancy things such
>> as reporting.
> 
> What is the reason to use SQL-based database? You'll perform direct
> queries to database? The packaging system is for ordinal users, not sql
> geeks, so they should not have to use sql for managing packages. So a

It's not SQL I'm interested in, it's the "additional" features:

- performance
- transaction safety ("commit all changes or none")
- constraints (like "unique" keys - sqlite unfortunately doesn't support
foreign keys)
- concurrent access (allowing to run multiple portupgrades at the same time)
- easy interface to C programs

If a BDB variety or some other storage layer can achieve these things,
I'll likely support them.

I know "Sleepycat" BDB implementations boast "transaction processing",
but can they offer this across multiple stores / databases at the same
time (i.e. like one transaction includes updates to multiple tables)?
Efficient (performance-wise) storage would probably need to use more
than one store, at least to index data by different keys.


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