On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 05:48:39PM -0600, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
  | On Wed, 18 Dec 2002, Greywolf wrote:
  | > # The very next release of XFree86 is supposed to be cross-buildable, so
  | > # at some point, we'll want to support all that in "xsrc". I gather you
  | > # just have to add "-U -M ${DESTDIR}/METALOG" to the install flags to
  | > # generate the metalog, but the "pax" man page, as of NetBSD 1.6K,
  | > # doesn't yield any clue as to how to use that feature.
  | >
  | > OOOOooooo!  This is VERY good news!  i can then rebuild X stuff for
  | > alternate platforms (such as SPARC) on an i386?  Wraukon the Excellent
  | > salutes you, or whomever made THAT happen!
  | 
  | I have nothing to do with that, but I'm looking forward to it, too.
  | 
  | > The metalog thing is something that should have happened aeons ago, IMO.
  | > I'm not sure why it never caught on.
  | 
  | Hmm... Maybe because it's not documented? Anywhere?

RTFS (of install(8)) :-)

Currently it's a text file with the same line syntax as an mtree(8)
spec file, and it is "munged" to contain the appropriate parent
directory specifications that a required by the mtree parser (which is
also used by pax) by tools such as distrib/sets/maketars.
Each time install(8) is invoked by the build system with UNPRIVED
defined a line is appended to ${DESTDIR}/METALOG.

I am investigating the performance versus complexity trade-offs
of converting METALOG to a btree(3) file, and using db(1) to
add entries that are currently manually added with "cat -l",
and also using db(1) to dump the info into pax.  If this works,
it should speed up the "maketars" and "installsets" targets in
distrib/sets when using UNPRIVED...

Luke.