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To me this sounds absolutely insane. Package managers that work in a couple of megabytes of ram is a solved problem. How can this be unsolvable?
by kstenerud 7y ago
To me this sounds absolutely insane. Package managers that work in a couple of megabytes of ram is a solved problem. How can this be unsolvable?
- Filligree 7y agoIt's not really the package-building process that takes tons of RAM. It's the OS-building process, where it pulls everything necessary to describe the current state of your machine into RAM, simultaneously. This typically means several hundred packages at least, plus a lot of code that's not as easily classifiable as "packages". The config file generators are written in the same language. Other operating systems punt on the challenge; there's no equivalent in e.g. Debian.
- kstenerud 7y agoI get that, but it ran out of ram on a machine with 2gb of ram. Even if there were 10 million things to keep track of, that's 200 bytes per thing! If we're talking about a file system with 100,000 files, that's 20 kb of metadata per file. Actually, more than that because it exhausted the ram. Those numbers just don't add up.