Second "RFC" on pkg-data idea for ports

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 4:29 PM -0700 4/14/04, Kris Kennaway wrote:
>On Wed, Apr 14, 2004, Robin Schoonover wrote:
>  >
>  > I use make -V a lot, and it's slow (every time you run it, make
>  > has to reread all the bsd.*.mk files, such as bsd.port.mk).  The
>  > speed isn't much of an issue when you only do one or two ports,
>  > but when you are examining the entire ports collection, you notice.
>  >
>>  That said, I'd still rather use a makefile based ports system anyway.
>
>Necessarily, *any* file format you choose will need to parse
>auxilliary files analogous to bsd.port.mk.  There's just no getting
>around the fact that ports rely on a lot of infrastructure and
>conditional evaluation to set their variables (although it can be
>optimized relative to what we have in CVS today [1]).
>
>Note that it's intentional that a lot of things are centralized
>in bsd.port.mk where they may be easily maintained, instead of
>being set in 10000 individual makefiles.
>
>Kris
>
>[1] As a test, I recently was able to cut index build times by
>60% from 5 to a little over 2 minutes on test box with fast disks,
>by stripping out (almost) everything non-essential from the 'make
>describe' code path.

Personally, I think you can get quite a penalty by trying to
perform too much string-manipulation by using make/sh variables
combined with all kinds of fancy invocations of sed, awk, etc.
In other situations (which are totally unrelated to ports), I
have greatly improved performance of some operation by replacing
some clever shell scripts with ruby or perl.  Neither of those
are speed demons compared to C, but they make a huge difference
for something which is using sed/awk for lots of low-level string
manipulation.

My hope is that if I get far enough along into the pkg-data project,
the result would be that many of the common operations would be
faster.  However, right now I can only say "that is one of my
goals", and I can't prove it would actually happen...

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu