Re: PROPOSAL: GNOME Volume Manager for GNOME 2.8

[Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>]

On Iau, 2004-06-10 at 10:47, Mike Hearn wrote:
> That email seems to be talking about reducing startup time by not having
> to trawl the disk for the theme data, which is a good optimization as
> well but you'd still be loading the actual icons into the heap of each
> process.

I had a play with this and some interesting things fall out of the
wash

1.	Its relatively expensive to explore the directories and
	stat all the contents you need to in order to see if a theme
	is up to date

2.	To work well you want preloading and madvise setups

3.	You have to deal with object alignment. Bad stuff occurs
	if you hand back byte aligned data to some programs expecting
	sane alignment.

4.	Its useful for a lot more than just icon themes

This leads me to conclude

a.	That themes should simply be shipped packed
b.	Any design should be totally generic
c.	Any design should have padding/alignment and since we
	never know future needs here the format should be self
	describing (so you can repack existing data
	differently and not break users).

I've posted a tiny library and example packer application to 
ftp://people.redhat.com/alan - called "packmap". By being totally
generic the library weighs in at a mere 1166 bytes on x86-64.


Alan