Old package activation states delay bootup

[jua]

I recently noticed that booting Haiku had become a lot slower for me than it used to be, and the delay was happening in the early boot process, i.e. even before the boot screen icons appear. The boot would be delayed by 10-20 seconds, during which the HDD light was continuously on.

Now I found the reason why: in /boot/system/packages/administrative I had accumulated >250 package activation state directories. The delay in early bootup was caused by the boot loader going through all these package states. After removing them, the bootup is now fast again.

Since these activation states accumulate over time, we should...

• Either add automatic cleanup of old states (or if there already is something like that, it needs improvement)
• Or improve efficiency of the boot loader reading the state directories
• Or both of the above :-)