Subject: Re: bug#54241: [PATCH 0/4] 'github' importer gracefully handles rate limiting

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2022 22:58:56 +0100

Hi,

Maxime Devos <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès schreef op vr 04-03-2022 om 21:45 [+0100]:
>> My concern is that we’d end up caching one or two little files in
>> ~/.cache for each candidate package, and (rate limit aside) the overhead
>> of dealing with the cache might outweigh the benefits.  I’d rather use
>> ‘http-fetch/cached’ for bigger files, like in (guix cve).
>> 
>> WDYT?
>
> If the overhead of caching little files is a concern, then perhaps a
> SQLite (or GDBM) database could be used instead of the filesystem-based
> cache?  The number of packages in Guix was about 150 000 IIRC, if we
> assume something around the magnitude of 200 bytes per package, then
> we end up with about 29 MiB for the entirity of Guix.  And there might
> be some opportunities for compression, reducing this number.

I think this would be going overboard in terms of complexity :-), and it
wouldn’t radically change the run-time overhead (you still potentially
have to do an HTTP round trip with ‘If-Modified-Since’, you’re just
saving a few hundred bytes on the response in the best case.)

> Something like this could be left for later though.

Yup!

Ludo’.