Time to abandon recursive pulling of dependencies?

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

[LoN]Kamikaze wrote:
> RW wrote:
>> On Sat, 12 May 2007 12:32:38 +0200
>> "[LoN]Kamikaze" <LoN_Kamikaze at gmx.de> wrote:
>>
>>> With Xorg updated to 7.2 many ports take much longer to register than
>>> to download, build and install. I think it's time to abandon the
>>> recursive pulling in of dependencies.
>> Does that matter all that much when there are ports that take
>> several hours to build?
>>
>> As I see it the important figure is the total time taken to register
>> all installed ports, divided by the total time to download, build and
>> install them. As long as that figure remains small it doesn't really
>> matter that small ports install inefficiently.
> 
> 
> My guess is that registering takes about 15% of the total upgrade time. Is that a small figure?

I agree with LoN that registering ports is taking way too long.  The 
same is true also of building packages.  When you do something like 
building gnome2 it all takes a very great deal of time.

However instead of abandoning the small ports approach, maybe the whole 
registering of ports needs redesigning, perhaps finding better 
algorithms, or perhaps using databases and things like that instead of 
text files and the directory /var/db/pkg.  Unfortunately I don't have 
the necessary skill set to help, or even to know the true cause of the 
slowdown.  On the other hand, I have a feeling that people are already 
working on this.

Stephen