[Rubygems-developers] Updating source index is slow

[Patrick May]

Hello,

On Wednesday, November 10, 2004, at 08:24  AM, Gavin Sinclair wrote:
>>> Does the rubygems client need the entire source index?  It seems to 
>>> me
>>> that one would be more likely to ask for a list of packages, then
>>> drill individually into the metadata for particular pages.
>
>> You're right.  It grabs (and caches) all of the gem metadata.   Your
>> idea for a solution might be the most pragmatic (as opposed to
>> implementing rsync in ruby ;).
>
> Nice and pragmatic, but I think the client should have all the
> metadata, all else being equal, to enable greater searches.
> Especially in GUI clients.

well, god forbid we have *2* cron jobs running on the server :-)

Kidding aside, the client and server are dependent on each other.  
Rubygems has a variety of (excellant!) client tools.  The server should 
support a variety of different ways of accessing the data.  Some folks 
drill down, some folks grab it all.  Everyone uses rubygems.

I think your idea about the index + md5's is good, it might be worth it 
to squeeze dependency data in there.  Ah, the sweaty smell of 
compromise.

~ patrick