Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2000 19:05:16 -0600 (MDT)
From: Jason Gunthorpe jgg@ualberta.ca
To: Buddha Buck bmbuck@14850.com
cc: William Lee Irwin III wli@holomorphy.com, debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Too Many Packages [was Re: Splitting locales...]

On Mon, 9 Oct 2000, Buddha Buck wrote:

> I'd be sort of interested in knowing what we are sorting, and why. We
> have under 10,000 packages, and my /var/lib/dpkg/available is under 5MB
> in size. Sorting time doesn't seem like it should be our biggest
> concern.

It isn't, apt-get does a qsort on startup and the time that takes is not
noticable. Particularly compared to the time it takes to parse and index
the package files (I have 9.7 meg worth of them too).

BTW, we have about 7500 different names of packages.

Jason

Rick Moen adds: You can get a count of packages available for your system by running "grep Package: /var/lib/apt/lists/*Packages | wc -l" at any time. As of 06 January 2006, on i386 architecture, this returns total available binary package counts as follows: