On Monday 29 January 2001  2:41 pm, Alistair Crooks wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 09:19:10AM -0500, Todd Vierling wrote:
> > About 2 years ago, I had a pet project that eliminated almost all the
> > recursions and used proper make(1) dependencies (`newpkgsrc').  Rather
> > than taking 10-20 seconds *on a nonloaded system* to go through a package
> > with entirely null extract, patch, configure, and build targets, the
> > modified bsd.pkg.mk took *2* seconds.  I'd consider that quite
> > significant.
>
> You seem to be pretty sure about your arguments - we can't possibly
> take a decision until we see some real figures.  So carry forward your
> work from two years ago, implement what you talk about above, and
> forward the patches to this list.  We can then see the significance of
> what you're talking about.

Recursive make is known to be bad on performance, especially in the 
nothing/little to make case.  See:
http://www.pcug.org.au/~millerp/rmch/recu-make-cons-harm.html
for some reasons why.  The example in there isn't highly detailed, however in 
the cook documentation does give a bit of a more detailed example.  (peter 
miller being the author of cook)

> And, yes, I have a definite interest in speeding up pkgsrc - I have
> two 40 MHz ss2s, a NeXT and two 486s in my collection.

The arm32 would benefit greatly due to rather bad pmap performance (but 
that's not the fault of pkgsrc)

Chris