Call for testers for yet another ports upgrade program, ports+

[Yoshihiro Ota]

On Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:57:34 -0700
Doug Barton <dougb at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> Yoshihiro Ota wrote:
> 
> > I think portmaster is also one tries to read and do the same things
> > but with shell script.
>
> Not exactly the same things. Portmaster doesn't keep any external
> database, it only updates what is in /var/db/pkg.
> 

Could you tell me a bit more or point to a source if already
written on how portmaster works.

> > I personally didn't have good luck with portmaster and haven't 
> > really used to evaluate. 
> 
> I'm sorry to hear that. If you're interested, please feel free to
> start another thread that describes your issues.

My problem was obsolete ports.  I think I need to put +IGNORE_ME
file for such ports, but I haven't spent much time on portmaster
so far yet.

> > However, "portmaster -a -n" wasn't not fast, neither. 
> 
> Well, I'm not sure when you last tried it, but I've implemented a lot
> of caching features in the past year, so nowadays almost all of the
> time spent running portmaster is actually spent in the ports tree,
> most of that in building the port.


I did about a half year ago and a couple days ago.
I don't think I am familar enough to evaluate portsmaster.

It is true that for big ports such as KDE, openoffice, java,
mozilla-drivens like seamonkey and firefox take long time to
compile from source.  That is where most time is spent for such
ports for ports+ as well.

However, when I upgraded X11 to 7.2 and perl script ports,
portupgrade spent most of time, like 5 to 10 minutes for each
port, and each port build is done in a coupe seconds to a
couple minutes.  That's when I started looking into speeding
up port-upgrading-management processes.

My goal is to minimize the resource by which ever port-upgrading
tool is and maximize the resource for the 'FreeBSD ports' system
doing its job.  For example, for instance, use all CPUs and
cores if possible.

> > By the way, it builds ports in background, doesn't it?
> 
> No, it only builds in the foreground. I've thought about various ways
> to try and implement parallel builds, but it's a pretty hard problem
> to solve in a reliable way. The reasons why have been covered in other
> threads, so you might want to check the archives.
> 
> Portmaster _does_ download new distfiles in the background though, as
> well as a few other functions that aren't typically user visible.

I see.  That's where my confusion was.

Hiro