[Aptitude-devel] Caching network data

[Daniel Burrows]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 03:52:46PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli <zack at debian.org> was heard to say:
> On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 06:23:35AM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> >   I looked around a few weeks ago and was unable to find any
> > "off-the-shelf" caching libraries.  So I'm currently thinking about
> > just rolling my own, maybe using sqlite to manage organizing the
> > index (and maybe even just storing *everything* in sqlite as BLOBs).
> > Anyone have a better idea?
> 
> Re-implementing yet another proxy seems quite dumb per se, but I agree
> that a drop-in solution does not appear to be evident. However, I
> think it would be worth to check whether there is some proxy solution
> that aptitude can recommend, recognize on the fly, and possibly use
> transparently without having to re-implement it.

  Hm, I hadn't thought to look at proxies.  My first reaction is that I
really don't want to force every aptitude user to set up and configure a
proxy server.  Even if there isn't any configuration, a lot of users
don't like to have something running on their computer that they "don't
need".  I'd much rather have something that aptitude can link against at
run-time.

  The thing that appeals to me about sqlite is that it can handle a lot
of the most tricky bits of managing a cache (maintaining consistency,
concurrent read/write access, indexed lookups, throwing out old entries,
etc) in a lightweight way, with no need for an external process.

  Daniel