Speeding up pkg_version and perhaps other port utilities

[Garrett Cooper]

Doug Barton wrote:
> Alexander Leidinger wrote:
>> Quoting Stephen Montgomery-Smith <stephen at math.missouri.edu> (Sat, 19 
>> May 2007 23:48:52 -0500):
>>
>>> On my system, the program pkg_version can double its speed simply by 
>>> replacing "make -V PKGNAME" by "make BEFOREPORTMK=yes -V PKGNAME"
> 
> This is very cool! I've already added it to my devel version of 
> portmaster in several places. I call make a LOT in portmaster, so I went 
> through every invocation and added this wherever it worked (i.e., didn't 
> cause a difference in (or absence of) output.
> 
> I'd also like to say thanks to Stephen, Alexander, and everyone else 
> who's taken an interest in optimizing the ports infrastructure. I've 
> managed to work around some of the inefficiencies with portmaster, but I 
> learn new tricks (like this one) on a regular basis. Having things be 
> more efficient to start with would be a great thing for all of our users.
> 
>>> It seems to me that with some clever use like this, certain commands 
>>> like "make all-package-depends" could selectively read only parts of 
>>> bsd.port.mk.
>>
>> You have to make sure no dependency is set in the second part of
>> bsd.port.mk then. I don't know for sure if this is already the case. I
>> expect that it is not the case.
> 
> It depends on the target. My suggestion would be to test them on an 
> individual basis. It's usually pretty clear if they will work or not.
> 
> hth,
> 
> Doug

(On a similar note):

Ugh.. I really hate the Ruby tools now. See 
<http://blogs.freebsdish.org/gcooper/2007/05/20/the-inefficiencies-of-pkgdbdb/> 
for more details.

-Garrett