On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 12:38:32PM -0500, Jeff Johnson wrote:
> Here's details of the hystory of rpmal.c and what I think needs to
> be done instead.
> 
> RPM started life as the engine for the Red Hat installer. The
> malloc() in libc.so.5 was buggy, so the entire index was designed
> as a huge array w/o ptrs, to simplify debugging and avoid memory
> fragmentation.

Frankly I don't quite understand what the "al" thing is, except that
"al" is used to reorder pacakges in rpmtsOder().  To me, al is just
a list of headers with TR_ADDED/TR_REMOVED flags attached to them.