Boot speedup with readahead

[James Antill]

On Mon, 2008-09-15 at 13:02 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:

> The question is: if one could throw RPM away and design a new one, could one
> do significantly better?

 Of course one could, the relevant question is _how long_ would it take.
And could it be done faster by just fixing rpm, and I've not seen any
compelling arguments that it would be faster to throw away what we have.

 It is also wide believed as true in the software field that "re-write
from scratch" is a last resort, and will always take longer and be more
expensive etc.
 There are cases where the subset of problems people care about is
smaller than those solved by the original program, "everyone" dislikes
the original program and a small group of good programmers are willing
to spend/invest a _lot_ of time to create a replacement. But I can only
think of a handful of examples here, and there's a reason for that.

> Lets look back at the problem at hand: we all agree that custom-installed
> glob-matched post-transaction triggers are useful things.  I think I can also
> say that we agree that it should be in the lowest-level package management
> system.  What has been up to debate so far is whether that lowest-level is
> RPM, or that RPM is a lost case and yum is considered the lowest-level.

 That is a severe mis-reading of the discussion, the question is given
that rpm+yum are currently how all Fedora users manage their system. Do
we want to still require that all packaging problems should be solved at
the rpm layer, or should we try to move up and allow some more of the
problems to be solved at the yum layer.
 There are many advantages to doing this, including just plain ease of
implementation. The only real disadvantage is that apt/smart/zypp/etc.
will become even more of a second class citizen in Fedora than they
already are (although I'm confident that the change proposed by Seth
could easily be ported to work in all of the above).

-- 
James Antill <james.antill at redhat.com>
Red Hat
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