Comments on Matt's blog: Hacking on usb-modeswitch, part 1

Compressed tar is not a good format for an archive...

2011-06-21T01:43:06.448-04:00

Compressed tar is not a good format for an archive that needs random access as there is no directory or index. To find a file, the whole archive needs to be scanned.

Zip is a lot better n that regard; that is why it is used by things like Java and Open Document Format.

This will allow the best of both worlds...

(I'm the Debian maintainer for usb-modeswitch{...

2011-06-19T04:54:38.625-04:00

(I'm the Debian maintainer for usb-modeswitch{,-data} ).

Honestly, I don't think the unpacking performance has any measurable impact: it happens _once_ per device, per switching. And it's not an operation that blocks the boot, as the udev script forks (hence not blocking the boot process).

As for the /var/cache idea, it could be done, but again I'm not sure that it would help, performance-wise: you still have to check for overrides in /etc/, purge the cache on databases upgrades, etc.

But I agree the tcl-script C rewrite is a good thing as it will reduce the dependencies footprint of usb-modeswitch.

Btw, feel free to contact me or upstream to discuss things further, I would be happy to avoid a diff between Debian and Ubuntu' usb-modeswitch'es.

You should keep the tarball of the files, but use ...

2011-06-18T19:56:56.227-04:00

You should keep the tarball of the files, but use a caching directory in /var/cache/ to hold the file you need. It can stay there for years if need be.

That way the performance delay will only happen on the first boot.