Bug#316468: [Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#316468: Implement, but assist backporters?

[Thomas Hood]

Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> It might be a bit slower (extra fork, pipe setup), but it won't make much
> of a difference, either way.  I doubt it is in the easily measurable land.


If there were an extra process _per file_ then it could make a big difference
for the worse.  However, I assume that "-delete" makes one system call per
file and that it would thus perform no worse than an rm call with many
arguments.  In all, the revised code would be slightly faster since it would
eliminate one process.  I guess this is the slight extra efficiency that the
submitter originally claimed.  Eliminating extra processes speeds things up
significantly on low-memory systems (so I am told).


>> How about we make this change but encapsulate the find call in a function
>> in order to assist the sarge backporters?  The sysvinit packages already
>> require modification for use in sarge.
> 
> IMHO It makes no sense to do such a change and place it in a function call,
> the function call is probably slower than the original code to begin with :)


Well, the submitter also claimed as advantages: eliminates the dependency on
xargs; is tidier; is less vulnerable to problems with very deep directory
hierarchies. The current code can only delete as many files as can be deleted
in a single rm command---which is no greater than the maximum number of
command line arguments.
-- 
Thomas