Hi all,

i've made a patch that extends mock-helper for the two new
internal commands 'save' and 'restore' for use with the
new added script /usr/libexec/mock-cache-copy that generates
a root cache, which is linked against the root tree and which
is copied statically.
This takes the double harddisk space of the root tree
(buildsys-build install) but hard disks are big enough today.

The advantage of this is that the files in the cache are
hard-linked to the files in the mock root tree that makes
it extremely fast to delete files (mock clean phase) and
to relink them (copy -ax ... on mock init phase) while unpacking
the cache. The static copy is used to repair touched and modified
(linked) files with rsync.

With this new option 'mock init' takes only 5 Seconds (between
Enter press and shell prompt).

The source package (with the patch included) can be found on the
Beuth repo at:
http://141.64.26.2/repo/bs/el5/SRPMS/mock-0.6.13-5.bs.el5.src.rpm

Especially my old PowerBook G4 / 400 MHz PowerPC (running C-5 ppc
edition) benefits of this feature (keeps the CPU away from tar
and gzip and uses the slow harddisk efficiently).

I hope this useful patch find a way to upstream (Fedora).
Please give me feedback and comparing benchmarks (against mock's
standard cache). ( The global config /etc/mock/defaults.cfg is set
up for using the additional caching method).

cheers,

B.S.