[CHANGE PROPOSAL] Moving WWW from pkg-descr to Makefile

[Doug Barton]

On 10/05/2012 07:05 AM, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I want to propose and make the actual move of the WWW information from the
> pkg-descr to the Makefile itself via a WWW variable.
> 
> doing this will have multiple benefits:
>  * consistency all metadata bug this one are in Makefile

... except for the distinfo data.

>  * speedup make describe avoiding using grep to get the informations (make
>    describe itself does not need speed but make index heavily use it and this
>    will definitly benefit from speed up)

Agreed, but there are other ways to speed up 'make describe,' and tools
like ports-mgmt/p5-FreeBSD-Portindex are a much better solution where
"create an up to date INDEX quickly" is a real need.

>  * Third party tool will be able to probe the information more easily.

Portmaster doesn't parse WWW for anything, but I have suggested to
others in the past that 'while read' in sh is a faster method of finding
the WWW than grep. In fact, 'make describe' uses this method now, not
grep. I vaguely recall that this was done at my suggestion, but I'm too
lazy to trace the commit path to confirm it. :) 'make www-site' (which
already exists in case there is a 3rd party tool that needs it) uses a
different method utilizing awk. I haven't tested which one is faster.

I'm also concerned about the proliferation of things being jammed into
the ports Makefile (and coincidentally, bpm). I've noticed that just
about every operation that portmaster does using 'make -V' has gotten
noticeably slower over the last 6-8 months, and the trend seems to be
getting worse instead of better.

> Do anyone have any concern about this?

For all these reasons, and for the already-stated reason that it
severely lowers the value of 'cat pkg-descr' (which I do quite often,
and I'm sure other users do as well) I think this is a bad idea.

Doug