A new and better way to do "make readmes"?

[Michel Talon]

Matthew Seaman said
The big problem with performance in all this INDEX and README.html
building is that it takes quite a long time relatively to run make(1)
within any port or category directory.  make(1) has to read in a lot of
other files and stat(2) many more[*] -- all of which involves a lot of
random-access disk IO, and that's always going to take quite a lot of
time.  Now, doing 'make readme' in a category directory doesn't just run
make in that directory, but also in every port in that category.
Popular categories can contain many hundreds of ports.

Maybe I should add README.html generation to my FreeBSD::Portindex
stuff.  Should be pretty simple -- all the necessary bits are readily
available and it is just a matter of formatting it as HTML and printing
it out.

Indeed, the following python script
http://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~talon/show_index.py
parses the index in a few seconds and can display exactly the same information as the
readme.html on demand in a web browser, which is far cleaner than polluting the ports tree
with the readmes. Alternatively i have a fcgi version that can be coupled to web servers
supporting fcgi like lighttpd.
http://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~talon/show_index.fcgi
Already 5 years this was done  ...


--

Michel Talon
talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr