On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 2:30 PM, Christian Robottom Reis kiko@linaro.org wrote:
By touch I think you mean install, upgrade or remove, and of these I guess upgrade is the more common case; do you think it is?
I think you're right. This hits the end user more than first-time installation - install and remove normally imply an explicit request from the user for something to happen, in which case the user expects to have to wait a bit; upgrades are housekeeping that may happen (and use power and potentially annoy the user) at any time (ish).
Would the overhead be significant even if the tarball wasn't compressed? I don't understand enough about tar's concatenate and delete performance to risk a guess.
tar's default internal blocksize is 512 bytes, so there would still be overhead but it would be less. I don't think tar really supports random access though, since tar files are sequential and monolithic; having many tarballs instead of just one may be better.
---Dave