[lug] Debian woes

[Daniel Webb]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 10:03:10PM -0700, Nick Golder wrote:

> APT is robust in that it allows you to increase the cache limit
> (APT::Cache-Limit) and not get "Dynamic MMap" errors.  The developers
> increasing the default is a double edged sword - damned if they do, damned if
> they don't.

The comment I saw once about this issue that seemed most "apt" (ha ha) was:

"not very 'dynamic', is it?"

And if it is unfixable, why doesn't the error message give a more informative
message.  Like, say, actually telling you how to fix the problem?  This has
been going on for years, and has been experienced by a significant fraction of
Debian users.  I can't think of many other applications where the size of the
dataset causes such headaches, and is dealt with in such an obscure way.

>From the GNU coding standards:

----
4.2 Writing Robust Programs

Avoid arbitrary limits on the length or number of any data structure,
including file names, lines, files, and symbols, by allocating all data
structures dynamically. 
----

Is there some technical reason this is impossible with apt?