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DS-Homebrew / TWiLightMenu

DSi Menu replacement for DS/DSi/3DS/2DS
https://wiki.ds-homebrew.com/twilightmenu/
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Bundle themes into tarballs for better extraction efficiency #1853

Open lifehackerhansol opened 2 years ago

lifehackerhansol commented 2 years ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Installing TWiLight Menu++ can be slow, especially on Universal Updater, because of the tiny files that mainly originate from the themes.

Describe the solution you'd like Just put 'em in a tarball. All you're doing is storing it. I think it'd be fairly trivial to get it to read from within a tar. No compression or anything.

Describe alternatives you've considered We could copy the apfix pack and then add a makefile for people to use.

Masamune3210 commented 2 years ago

Lots of tiny files will always be slow to process by storage no matter what kind of archive or originating format it is in. The bottleneck isn't in the storing, its in the queueing and overhead of dealing with fs accounting

lifehackerhansol commented 2 years ago

Lots of tiny files will always be slow to process by storage no matter what kind of archive or originating format it is in. The bottleneck isn't in the storing, its in the queueing and overhead of dealing with fs accounting

The loading in TWiLight Menu++ will be the same, just like you explained. However, that was not the point of this issue.

The point is not the use of TWiLight Menu++, but the installation process. All Windows or any other operating system, or even homebrew installers such as Universal Updater will only see the one .tar file. What I ask is that each theme is bundled in a .tar, and then TWiLight reads from the .tar, and the .tar is never actually extracted anywhere.

Masamune3210 commented 2 years ago

I get it now, it ultimately would probably come down to the difficulty in dealing with a archive format vs raw fs, and the amount of time needed to retrofit the new changes needed for it

lifehackerhansol commented 2 years ago

We could always leave the old theme loading intact, but future themes would be done by .tar.

Of course the default bundled themes should be converted to the new format as well (since well the installation process is the whole reason this issue exists). And we can do a one-off script in https://github.com/DS-Homebrew/twlmenu-extras/ to convert all the existing themes. (should just be extract 7z, tar the files inside, then re-compress as 7z.)