+CONTENTS files

[Alexander Leidinger]

Quoting Garrett Cooper <youshi10 at u.washington.edu> (from Mon, 02 Jul  
2007 08:10:14 -0700):

> Alexander Leidinger wrote:

>> The problem is, that a change would break existing installations,   
>> as they can not cope with such a new format. Feel free to propose   
>> improvements, but you need to keep in your mind, that any supported  
>>  FreeBSD release has to be able to install packages with only the   
>> package tools available in the basesystem.
>
> The point is though that there's a lot of unnecessary bloat, which adds
> to longer text file sizes, and thus slows down smarter parsers written
> in C, Perl, or Python.

How do you determine it is bloat and not needed by some tool? For  
example the recent speed improvements for package registration grep  
for the dependencies in the +CONTENTS files. The checksums are needed  
for integrity checking, and the rest is needed management stuff.  
portupgrade is taking some informations out of the +CONTENTS files  
too. I assume similar management tools do the same.

>>>   My point being is that the +CONTENTS file is bloated a lot by
>>> useless lines, and it would help speed up package processing if it was
>>> clipped or reduced somehow I would think.
>>
>> You need to provide numbers. Without them this is pure speculation.
>>
>> And you have to explain, why the current parsing routines can not   
>> be speed up for the current format, maybe the implementation is   
>> just a little bit outdated compared to todays parsing knowledge...

>    Ok. I take your challenge and will have preliminary results in 2-3
> days. Are Excel formatted spreadsheets ok (thinking graphs)?

Graphs are provided best as pictures (on a website). Not everyone is  
able to read excel files on his FreeBSD system.

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
What good is a ticket to the good life,
if you can't find the entrance?

http://www.Leidinger.net    Alexander @ Leidinger.net: PGP ID = B0063FE7
http://www.FreeBSD.org       netchild @ FreeBSD.org  : PGP ID = 72077137