I think to go really fast, you'll have to introduce a new data structure, similar to git's. (I'm thinking it's a trie, but I'm coming up zero evidence for that.

I think to go really fast, you'll have to introduce a new data structure, similar to git's. (I'm thinking it's a trie, but I'm coming up zero evidence for that.) Calculating the dependency graph could be nearly instantaneous with an improved data structure on the client. Syncing the local tree with the remote authority can also be blazingly fast. After that, if you really want to be smart, you can use an rsync style transfer that only copies differences. And if you want to boil the whole ocean, make all the package maintainers conform to a standard that reduces installation to a pure copy operation. It'd be awesome if updating a node was a sub-second operation, it's definitely a big benefit to cloud based computing.