RPM filesystem?

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le jeu, 03/06/2004 à 10:31 -0400, Tim Daly a écrit :
> a simple question: why unpack RPMS? Clearly Linux itself can be run
> compressed (Live CDs do that now). Given the bottleneck of slow disk
> and fast CPU it might be faster to load the compressed image, unpack
> it, and execute it then it would to load it directly. 

Because there are those pesky thinks known as configuration files that
*will* be modified post-install and people don't want to hunt for into a
gazillon archives, because it permits interoperability with all sorts of
differently packaged software, because one often does not use 100% of a
package at a time (thus the overhead of loading the whole archive in
memory would be *huge*), etc, etc

Sun tried to go the sinle-archive way with war files. The first thing
the reference java application server (tomcat) does with them is to
unpack them to disk. So you waste disk space, cpu time, get all the
problems of closed archives without any real benefit.

Seems proprietary vendors like them however. They feel it saves them the
bother of actually having to follow the system standards to interoperate
correctly, since most humans won't check the junk they stuff their
archives with (see also security through obscurity)

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Ceci est une partie de message num?riquement sign?e
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/attachments/20040603/f70d0f07/attachment.sig>