Re: [Apt-proxy-users] Performance problems on Debian/mips

[Chris H. <chr...@ni...>]

Hi Manual,

On Thu, Feb 28, 2002 at 08:10:24PM +0100, Manuel Estrada Sainz wrote:
>  First of all thanks a lot for apt-proxy, its a great program and an
>  even better idea.

:-)

>  I what to make clear that I don't what to start a flamewar and I'm not
>  trying to force anything on anyone.
> 
>  apt-proxy runs quite slowly on the SGI Indy that I want to use as
>  proxy, and I realized that it is written in shell script using the
>  "Little powerful tools" philosophy, which has a poor performance. I
>  never thought that a proxy could be written in shell script, quite
>  impressive.
> 
>  Now to the point, what would be the drawbacks of using perl, python or
>  even C instead of shell script?  At some point I may try to rewrite
>  apt-proxy using one of those and I would like to know what you think
>  about it.

As you say, the idea itself is great, but apt-proxy is not all that
wonderful. apt-proxy itself was almost unusable during 2001, because 
changes to the Debian archives (the pool structure) caused it to stop
working as intended.  During that period I think quite a few people tried
it, found it was very difficult to set up and use, and some had a go at
writing their own.  I know of at least 3 other similar projects.  I tried
debproxy over on Sourceforge, but found the code to be too buggy to be fun
to use.  When apt-proxy came up for adoption in Debian I took the chance to
incorporate the fixes I had already made into the Debian distribution, with
a view to making sure that Woody had a working apt-proxy.  

I do not really see apt-proxy in its present form as having a shelf life
beyond the Woody release, because I expect (and hope) that another
implementation will have caught up with apt-proxy, in terms of stability,
ease of installation, and features.  There isn't anything ready in all areas
yet, so apt-proxy 1.x lives on.  In the meantime I'm just having fun getting
experience as a package maintainer, upstream developer and doing something
useful at the same time :)

It would probably be a good idea for me to put this info up on the home
page, together with links to all the other projects.  I would have thought
it would be better for people to work together on one of these than have so
many little projects.  At the moment, I think aptcached looks the most
promising.  The code looks nice and clean but I haven't actually installed
it to give it a test run yet.

You can have a look here:
http://talk.trekweb.com/~jasonb/software.shtml

Chris
-- 
Chris Halls | Frankfurt, Germany <><
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