Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] Scrollkeeper delay

[Dan M. <mu...@al...>]

On 20 Jun 2003, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:

> On Fri, 2003-06-20 at 21:09, Pablo Fernandez wrote:

> > Is there anyway to avoid the rebuild of the database without rebuilding
> > the packages that use the scrollkeeper-update program?
> 
> Not easily. An ugly, but possibly workable solution would be to
> temporarily alias the scrollkeeper-update name to something harmless
> like ':' and then run scrollkeeper-update once as part of some
> post-install fixup.

Is the system really doing a complete rebuild of the database?  If so, 
then it is duplicating work and it would make sense to have a way to turn 
scrollkeeper off (such as temporarily replacing the binary or having a 
line in /etc/scrollkeeper.conf).  Then when the distribution installation 
is done, you should update the database.

However, when each package installs, it should only be doing an update of 
the database.  Since these are incremental, it shouldn't be much faster to 
do one large update at the end of the distribution installation than to do 
a number of smaller updates during the installation.

If you were in a really big pinch and wanted to hack things, you could 
disable ScrollKeeper during the install and then have a script run later 
(like on the next reboot or off of cron) that restores ScrollKeeper and 
does an update.

The real solution to this problem is to extend ScrollKeeper so that one 
can process the docs at build time and install the generated data so that 
ScrollKeeper doesn't have to do it at install time.  We would need to be 
careful that ScrollKeeper versions are kept track of so that we leave room 
for future extensions without breaking things.  (ie. It checks the version 
number used when generating the files and determines whether they are 
compatible with the installed version of ScrollKeeper.)  This is something 
which definitely needs to be done, although it is a bit of work and has to 
be thought through pretty carefully.  In the end, it will be an optional 
extension, so it won't be too useful until people update their build 
scripts to use it.

-Dan