rpm package with many files inside

[Howard Wilkinson]

Florian,

While this may not be a possibility for you, in the bad old days we used 
to use archive (aka libraries or '.a') files to get round this and to 
'save' disk and inode usage. The software was then modified to use 
library extraction to get the files it needed. I know this is not 
in-line with the packaging approach that is used today, especially 
requiring functionality changes. But it is a useful trick to try. What 
we used to do (this is 1980's remember) is set up 'directories' and map 
the content of each directory onto an archive file.

Anyway that's my 2 'cents' worth, hope it is not just noise

Regards, Howard.

Florian Festi wrote:
> Roberto Ragusa wrote:
>> Jan Chadima wrote:
>>> Hello All
>>> I need to create rpm package with cca 500000-1000000 tiny files 
>>> inside. The whole tree is about 2-3GB binary data. Koji dies with 
>>> "error: Unable to create immutable header region." There are 
>>> existing bug
>>
>> One million files means (at 4KiB per file even if its length is one 
>> byte) about 4GiB of space
>> on most filesystems (everyone except reiserfs, IIRC).
>>
>> And I don't want to imagine the stress that one-million-files rpms 
>> can cause to the
>> rpm/yum machinery, which is quite slow even in normal usage.
>
> There have been major efforts to speed up transaction with a lot of 
> files and reduce the memory foot print. A few million files should now 
> be installable. Don't try this with rpm 4.4.2. Of course this remains 
> a huge pile of data/files that is not supposed to be processed in a 
> few seconds.
>
> Florian
>