Pardus 2007.1 RC is out. RC includes pisi version 1.1.1. There is a nice improvement in this version that makes more effective searches possible and also has a %40+ speed improvements in the update repository phase:

When you press “Show Upgradable Packages” in package manager; pisi downloads and compares the sha1sum of the repository index file. If it is different than the current one, it means there is an update in the repository. Then after downloading the new index file, pisi updates its package database. This is where you wait at the “Update Repository” progress dialog.

As Barış blogged about, Zemberek developer Mehmet has joined our team as a full time developer. Mehmet is currently working on the database improvements of pisi. He is the one who has pointed out the search code of pisi that we found unnecessarily complicated. I am not going to go into details of this. But we threw out whole search code and written a 15 line replacement.

This is the result of this change:

With pisi prior to 1.1.1:

# time pisi rebuild-db -y
…
real 2m32.354s
user 0m52.436s
sys 0m1.832s

With pisi 1.1.1:

# time pisi rebuild-db -y
…
real 1m17.939s
user 0m29.684s
sys 0m1.148s

Package manager will also benefit from this. 2007.1 release will include case insensitive search in package’s name, summary and description informations. This feature was painfully slow to be done from package manager. There were many important bugs to be fixed in package manager before the 2007 stable release, so there wasn’t much time for this part to improve. Because of that it was left as very primitive.