0.50rc1 feedback

Gustavo Niemeyer gustavo at niemeyer.net
Mon Dec 11 15:10:50 PST 2006


> Couldn't smart just after downloading the list files do an ls on the
> remote directory (or Python direct equivalent) and check for the
> existence of the files?

We can't do that for a number of reasons:

- Just listing files isn't enough. We need information inside
  each file.

- Many protocols don't support listing directories (e.g. HTTP
  without WEBDAV)

- Even if we do have a protocol capable of listing files, and
  can get slices of specific files to query them, it'd be
  somewhat expensive to list and retrieve small blobs from
  thousands of packages

For these reasons we have indexes.

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net



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