GoboLinux's recipe for delicious package management (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

GoboLinux's recipe for delicious package management (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 15, 2007 18:59 UTC (Thu) by thedevil (guest, #32913)
In reply to: GoboLinux's recipe for delicious package management (Linux.com) by nix
Parent article: GoboLinux's recipe for delicious package management (Linux.com)

>> As for cleaning up the broken links, that's a job for GNU stow or Depot. <<

I tried this scheme too, long ago before I became a Debian addict. This really *is* the catch, even with tools like stow, because of INefficiency. stow -D can take forever even for a single package. I guess that is because removing the symlinks destroys access locality.

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GoboLinux's recipe for delicious package management (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 17, 2007 1:56 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Well, it's because it has to readdir() every directory in the system. I
have a tiny patch that makes stow use the d_type info, so that at least it
doesn't have to stat() everything as well. But still it blows the cache,
yes. (That's why you can -D / -R several things at once.)