Hi Michael, nice to hear from you! Of course disk-based structures are easy to implement - FDNPKG already uses them extensively for storage. The key word here is speed - keeping packages metadata in RAM is fast. Parsing and searching through on-disk data structures is at least a magnitude slower.
Now, of course I could implement some indexing mechanisms on top of that, and end up designing a specialized 16 bit database engine that would fit in the 640K limit of memory... Unfortunately I don't have enough free time for this kind of "monster projects", although this might positively change in a decade or two. Until then, I'll let others do such work. BTW, any plans on publishing a DJGPP-compatible version of mTCP? I'd be happy to switch from Watt32. I fear mTCP will get no traction if it ignores the more interesting 32-bit projects. ;) cheers, Mateusz On 01/09/2015 17:45, Michael Brutman wrote: > The current memory requirement is a function of your design, which I > think could be improved. Disk based data structures are not that > difficult to implement. > > I have a PCjr with a 20GB Maxtor drive on it, of which 600MB is in use. > There are lots of 8086 and 80286 class machines with larger than > original hard drives on them; drive overlay software made that possible > 20 years ago. Recent IDE controller projects have expanded the number > of old machines that are hard drive capable. You are incorrect in you > belief that old machines can not benefit from a package manager. > > FreeDOS will get no traction among the sizeable retro-computing > community of these kinds of design decisions continue to ignore the more > interesting, older machines. > > On Aug 31, 2015 11:50 PM, "Mateusz Viste" <mate...@viste.fr > <mailto:mate...@viste.fr>> wrote: > > Hi Sparky, > > On 31/08/2015 19:38, sparky4 wrote: > > I want to make a 16 bit version of this program... wwww > > You are most certainly welcome to do so - that's what open-source is all > about. > > I can't help but wonder though - is there any practical need behind such > work? I don't really see what this would improve. Sure, it would make > FDNPKG potentially run on 80286 CPUs - but I am not convinced anyone > would want to run a package manager on a 286. Disk space is usually > scarce on these machines (if there is a hard disk in the first place), > so I'd rather think people will turn to good old manual 'copying what I > need' on such hardware. It's worth noting that 8086 and 80186 are out of > scope anyway due to memory constraints, since FDNPKG definitely requires > more than 640K of RAM to work. > > Mateusz > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
