New FreeBSD ports system - bachelors work

[Garrett Cooper]

On Apr 29, 2010, at 10:08 AM, Aldis Berjoza wrote:

> Some time ago I've read, that FreeBSD might be interested
> to move ports tree to database (sqlite?).
> This would require rewriting of all existing and writing
> some new tools related to ports.
> 
> 
> I'm IT student and next year I have to write bachelor work.
> As active FreeBSD user, I am very interested in supporting
> FreeBSD, and, if FreeBSD developers, think that such ports
> reimplementation would benefit FreeBSD community, I'd be
> willing to develop new system.
> 
> If you have other ideas, how to improve FreeBSD ports
> please let me know. Currently this is just an idea, but I'm
> also open to other suggestions/ideas.
> 
> 
> Please, FreeBSD team, replay to my email ASAP, cause I have
> very limited time to select subjects for next semester,
> this will also affect my bachelors work.

Aldis,
	For technical discussions that require some degree of design oversight into ports and packaging in general, please get in touch with portmgr at . I can tell you right now though, sqlite was an idea that is most likely not going to fly with pkg_install though, unless it's a completely modular framework where BDB 1.8x can be used in its place. The thing is that while certain tools like portmgr use this to `speed' things up... it's somewhat artificial as using INDEX sufficiently fast in most cases and most of the performance -- and most importantly functional issues -- lie elsewhere in the code.
	FWIW there was also a discussion about the merits of speed with sqlite and bdb with small-to-medium-ish datasets (of which ports is... currently 21k elements stored in one data table), and sqlite was significantly slower according to the performance data nox (I think it was nox at least...) had on hand.
Thanks,
-Garrett