Can anyone direct me to some information about what WITHOUT_PROFILE="YES" actually means.

[Michael Powell]

dweimer wrote:

> 
> I have ran into a recent issue, after a lot of trouble shooting I have
> narrowed it down to something in my /etc/src.conf
> 
> the full file just has:
> WITHOUT_BIND="YES"
> WITHOUT_NTP="YES"
> WITHOUT_FLOPPY="YES"
> WITHOUT_FREEBSD_UPDATE="YES"
> WITHOUT_PROFILE="YES"
> 
> Of course bind and ntp are added in by ports after the system is built,
> everything compiles, I have a very specific issue with one thing not
> working on an installed port, with no apparent error.  To make a long
> story short though one of my build attempts, I forgot to copy the
> /etc/src.conf file to the new system.  And well the problem was gone,
> when I discovered that's what I did differently, I commented out all
> lines on a different system rebuilt and installed, sure enough it
> worked.  Looking at the src.conf options that I was using, I can't see
> how any option other than the WITHOUT_PROFILE could possibly be causing
> the problem.  Though I am in the process of building systems with
> different options removed in an attempt to find out for sure.
> 
> The WITHOUT_PROFILE was added from a help document I read some time ago
> about upgrading from source, and hasn't caused any problems before now.
> I know it instructs the build process to avoid compiling profiled
> libraries.  But my searching hasn't been able to lead me to what the
> difference is between a profiled and non-profiled library is.
> 

I'm not a code hacker, so take with pinch of salt. In the man page for 
src.conf it declares that variable values would be ignored, and of course I 
missed that. While I have WITHOUT_PROFILE= true in my src.conf, the correct 
use is simply WITHOUT_PROFILE by itself. Since I have never experienced any 
form of difficulty perhaps the difference here is the quotation marks. Maybe 
something is malfunctioning from the "".  See if removing these helps?

Also, from what I understand what's in src.conf should only apply to 
building the system, e.g code located under /usr/src. I've always taken this 
to mean it should not apply to building anything in ports. 

My limited understanding is that when you build profiled code you are 
inserting a little extra debug code which is utilized to measure the time 
spent within internal structures, such as functions and other sub-routines. 
Not that I even know how such info would get extracted at runtime, 
programmers use this to look for areas within their code that hog resources 
time-wise and zero in on those to concentrate on makeing more 
efficient/faster.

-Mike