[Rpm-metadata] metadata layout problems and some history

[Anders F Björklund]

seth vidal wrote:

> There have been some small changes over the years but I believe none
> that have broken the parsers of any of tools.

The biggest changes for smart was the change to the sha256 checksums
and unique-md-filenames which meant old cache files weren't deleted.

> Then what happened was all of the folks using/maintaining the tools
> found issues they had to work around and so we did:

> - Smart runs an indexer over the xml files to generate the byte-offset
> locations of pkgs in the xml file so it can seek to those locations
> quickly.

Except that quick-er doesn't mean that it still wasn't dog slow...

    "Well, at least having an index cuts list time from
     30 minutes to 30 seconds. On the other hand, that is
     still ridiculously slow compared to the usual 3...
     So I don't think the cache size/startup time matters ?"

So neither metadata nor sqlite has been merged into the trunk.
It's all being stored in the cache, instead of using XML/SQL.

--anders