Limitations of Ports System

[Garrett Cooper]

On Dec 13, 2007, at 10:17 AM, Warren Block wrote:

> On Thu, 13 Dec 2007, Steven Kreuzer wrote:
>
>> This thread was called "results of ports re-engineering survey"  
>> but I figured I would start a new thread.
>
> Rightly so.
>
>> On Dec 12, 2007, at 6:45 AM, Ade Lovett wrote:
>>> We *know* it can be done better.  We *know* the scaling limits of  
>>> the current system, and most of us are completely amazed it even  
>>> still works.
>>> If y'all want to make a difference, concepts and ideas we have  
>>> plenty of. Code talks.
>>
>> Out of curiosity, are any of these shortcomings documented  
>> anywhere? I have been using ports on my home machine for a long  
>> time and I've never
>> had any problems with it. I assume the issues come into play when  
>> you work with multiple systems you are trying to keep in sync, etc.
>>
>> I would be interested in reading about some of the limitations  
>> people have run into when using ports.
>
> Notable with the new modular Xorg is the speed of changes (install/ 
> deinstall/clean) when there are a lot of ports installed. Before  
> modular xorg, 400 ports installed was a lot.  700 now is not  
> surprising.
>
> Some profiling looking for areas which could benefit from speed  
> optimization would be useful.  That may have already been done but  
> not publicized.
>
> -Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA


My hunch is that part of the problem lies in the fact (unfortunately)  
that everything's done via Makefiles and that there's a lot of  
redundancy to some extent with the operations performed by  
pkg_install and friends (at least from reading and writing the /var/ 
db/pkg* and /usr/ports/INDEX* files are concerned), in particular  
when dealing with non-slave / -master instances, and how make is  
invoking pkg_install(1). I don't have hard evidence to support that  
point though, and until that point is reached my comment is merely  
speculation.

-Garrett