X.Org 6.8.2 - (most probably) final patch

[Jon Noack]

Eric Anholt wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-02-20 at 06:02 +0100, Dejan Lesjak wrote:
>> On Sunday 20 of February 2005 05:22, Russell Jackson wrote:
>>> The xorg people seem to believe that nobody uses the split tarballs
>>> anymore because everyone is on broadband. You might want to explain the
>>> 'meta-port uber build space problem' to them. This is at least the
>>> impression I got while reading a recent thread on the xorg mailing list.
>> 
>> Problem of this sort was already pointed out here:
>> http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xorg/2005-February/006260.html
>> (And I've mailed question a couple days later that that.) On the mirrors there 
>> are README files that say split files will be available. They may or may not 
>> at one time been put here:
>> http://xorg.freedesktop.org/X11R6.8.2/src/
>> but while links are there, the files themselves are not.
>> About the "uber build space": this should only be a problem if one is building 
>> meta port from scratch as opposed to upgrading. That would hopefully mean 
>> that there is enough space still available (as this would be a fresh install 
>> and all), so I hope this is not a horrible problem. If however it proves to 
>> be difficult, we can still untar a distfile only partially. This would not 
>> change the build or contents of installed packages, so it wouldn't affect 
>> results of ports cluster tests which need to be run sooner rather than later 
>> in order to commit the upgrade in time for ports freeze for FreeBSD 5.4.
>> So if anybody has concerns about build space for building meta-port from 
>> scratch, do please yell and we'll try to shrink it :)
>> (I'll ask again later and also on ports@ if the split distfiles are still not 
>> available at that time).
> 
> Earlier today I sent an email to Roland, who was the RW for 6.8.2,
> asking for split tarballs.  However, as everyone should be using
> portupgrade, the build space shouldn't be a problem, right? (heh)

The build space is not a big deal to me; my machines have adequate free 
space to handle it.  However, it's not fun to extract the full tarball 
on older/slower machines.  Having to do it a 17 times is downright 
painful.  Using tar exclusions doesn't solve the speed issue, because 
the tarball still has to be decompressed and searched.  For example, 
let's exclude every subdirectory in the tarball (leaving only the files 
in xc/) and compare the time and space needed to a full extraction on my 
dual PentiumIII 933MHz w/ 2GB RAM (NOTE: this is using bsdtar on 
5.3-STABLE.  I also tried gtar and the results were similar):

$ cat exclusions
xc/CVS*
xc/config*
xc/doc*
xc/exports*
xc/extras*
xc/font*
xc/include*
xc/lib*
xc/nls*
xc/programs*
xc/util*
$ cat X11R6.8.2-src.tar.bz2 > /dev/null
$ time tar -X exclusions -xf X11R6.8.2-src.tar.bz2

real    0m59.926s
user    0m58.741s
sys     0m0.841s
$ du -d 1 xc
506     xc
$ rm -rf xc/
$ time tar -xf X11R6.8.2-src.tar.bz2

real    1m30.121s
user    1m0.018s
sys     0m14.661s
$ du -d 1 xc
1824    xc/nls
82080   xc/programs
21208   xc/lib
26770   xc/doc
2100    xc/config
46422   xc/extras
12      xc/CVS
103872  xc/fonts
1888    xc/include
110     xc/util
286792  xc
$

Check out the user times; there are almost identical.  As one would 
expect, the full extract takes longer because the data has to be written 
to disk (see sys time).

My point is that we can easily resolve the build space issue with 
exclusions, but there remains an issue with CPU usage.  Even using 
exclusions, my machine would still spend at least 17 minutes JUST 
EXTRACTING THE TARBALL when installing or upgrading X.Org.  That's a 
lot.  If at all possible, it would be great if we could convince the 
X.Org folks to bring back the split tarballs...

Jon