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> To the contrary, that would not remain balanced, because your |
| 2 |
> boundaries are entirely dependent on exactly what is in the tree at |
| 3 |
> the moment you run your script. Now the package manager has to perform |
| 4 |
> directory listing, sort and find the file name that's closest, open |
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> that directory, find the next closest filename (assuming multiple |
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> levels of hierarchy), and so on, or you have to store yet another |
| 7 |
> index that duplicates information and takes additional space. Locating |
| 8 |
> by distfile name hash is effectively free. |
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| 10 |
Sure, the tree won't be perfectly balanced but it will be pretty close. |
| 11 |
E.g. if texlive-* dominates the tree today it will likely continue |
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dominating it for another 5 years. Statistical distribution of distfile |
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names will likely be changing very slowly. |
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| 15 |
Doing a binary search through a list of couple of hundred of directories |
| 16 |
is really cheap. I don't see a reason to organize distfiles in a |
| 17 |
multi-level hierarchy: e.g. if the goal is to keep no more than 1000 |
| 18 |
files in a folder than the limit of single level hierarchy is a million |
| 19 |
which is more than enough for foreseeable future. The list of 500 |
| 20 |
directories takes 15kB when using full file names and will be couple of |
| 21 |
times smaller when using only unique prefixes. |
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--- |
| 24 |
Andrew |
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