UPDATING 20110730

[Michel Talon]

Le Monday 01 August 2011, Doug wrote:
> 
> A lot of people say that, but I'll stack it up against just about any
> interpreted language. Some of my routines are actually faster than the
> equivalents in pkg_info (which is why I use them).
>

Yes, i have seen that  portmaster is quite fast. I was meaning that shell
scripting is not the clearest tool  to program complex stuff, but of course
this is dependant on each person.  As for the  pkg*  stuff  they are written 
in C, but this is irrelevant enough if they do a lot of IO, or use poorly 
performing algos.  I remember that Marc Espie said that, after having 
rewritten the OpenBSD equivalents in perl, they were both clearer and
more powerful, and much faster. The slowness gripe i have is about 
portupgrade. This is particularly obvious when running portupgrade -PP, which 
may take hours to upgrade a machine without spending any time in 
compilation. As far as i have understood the pkg* tools are presently being 
rewritten by a FreeBSD team, i hope the new tools will be much better. 
This being said if an upgrade tool needs to compute (partially) the INDEX, 
most of the time is spent in running  make -V  <variables> in each port,
because make has to read and interpret enormous files. I don't see any way to 
cut on that, or one should need to develop a special purpose version of  make
to evaluate these variables,  perhaps which should keep persistent 
computations between ports (but this is dangerous).