Where fink was taking more than a minute to report on what packages it was managing, the addition of Storable.pm cuts that to 15 seconds.
fink puts the tarball for Storable on disk but doesn’t install it where perl can find it (in a directory in its @INC array). Here’s how to do that.
[/Users/paul]:: cp /sw/src/Storable-1.0.14.tar.gz src
[/Users/paul]:: cd src
[/Users/paul/src]:: tar zxf Storable-1.0.14.tar.gz
[/Users/paul/src]:: cd Storable-1.0.14
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: perl Makefile.PL
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: make
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: make test
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: sudo make install
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: fink list xfree86
Reading package info…
Fink has detected that your package cache is out of date and needs an
update, but does not have privileges to modify it. Please re-run fink as
root, for example with a “fink index” command.
Information about 1334 packages read in 113 seconds.
system-xfree86 4.2-1 Placeholder package for manually installed X…
i xfree86-base 4.2.0-6 XFree86 libraries, utilities, clients and data.
xfree86-rootles 4.2.0-3 MacOS X/Darwin XFree86 display server.
xfree86-server 4.2.0-2 XFree86 display server (stable release)
(paul@pink)-(07:59 AM / Mon Aug 05)
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: fink index
sudo /sw/bin/fink index
Reading package info…
Updating package index… done.
(paul@pink)-(08:02 AM / Mon Aug 05)
[/Users/paul/src/Storable-1.0.14]:: fink list xfree86
Information about 1334 packages read in 15 seconds.
system-xfree86 4.2-1 Placeholder package for manually installed X…
i xfree86-base 4.2.0-6 XFree86 libraries, utilities, clients and data.
xfree86-rootles 4.2.0-3 MacOS X/Darwin XFree86 display server.
xfree86-server 4.2.0-2 XFree86 display server (stable release)
Still pretty slow: I see others reporting elapsed times of a second, but this is a 350MHz G3, not a smoking fast 800 MHz G4.