Port system "problems"

[Marcus von Appen]

Matthew Seaman <m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk>:

> On 26/06/2012 10:31, Andrea Venturoli wrote:
>> On 06/26/12 11:03, Matthew Seaman wrote:
>>
>>> Yes, it will multiply the number of ports.  By three is about right,
>>> given that most ports will only have port-docs and port-examples
>>> sub-ports.  However, first of all, you are assuming that the effort
>>> required to install each of those sub-ports is the same as it is to
>>> install a single port now.  That is simply not the case.
>>
>> Not exactly.
>> I still didn't get the details, so I might speak nonsense, however...
>>
>> The "effort" will be 3x processing time for portupgrade (or whatever) to
>> update the package database 3 times as much as before.
>> I remember the big X.org split up: going from a few ports to tens of
>> them slowed down an installation/upgrade process by an order of
>> magnitude (or even more).
>
> The X.org split up is an extreme case -- it went from three or four
> ports to several hundred ports as I recall.  Yes, that made a big
> difference, because they were all individual ports and all of the
> processing steps required to install a port had to be repeated for each
> of them.
>
> Sub-ports should be much more efficient, as there's a lot of the work
> involved in installing which is a one-time thing when installing port
> plus some collection of sub-ports.

How does that look like in detail? Are there any concepts on about
how it is supposed to work, what the implications are, and so forth?

Cheers
Marcus