One of the more peculiar Linux distributions to emerge recently has been SprezzOS, which debuted with claims of being the most robust, performant, and beautiful Linux. When it launched it didn't generate much attention, but recently the SprezzOS developers began rewriting Debian's APT software.

Earlier this month I reported on the SprezzOS Raptorial project that is rewriting Debian APT with a focus on performance. Raptorial is meant to be a drop-in replacement to APT that focuses on parallelism and project art. The initial program to be published was "rapt-show-versions", which was much faster than apt-show-versions on modern hardware.

Nick Black of SprezzOS announced on Sunday that their apt-file rewrite is now done too. The raptorial-file program is ready for users. The performance wins aren't as huge as with the apt-show-versions replacement, but being 25% faster is common for this new program while some other paths improved by more than 90%.

But then after fixing a bug, it turns out that raptorial-file is about twice as fast as the Debian program. "After fixing a stupid bug [0], improvement is much more stark, closer to a 2x speedup. the case for raptorial-file(1) just became much more convincing."

The announcement about this new apt-file rewrite can be found on the SprezzOS mailing list.