Re: pkgsrc performance

[David Laight <david%l8s.co.uk@localhost>]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 09:44:22AM +0100, Roland Illig wrote:
> Jared D. McNeill schrieb:
> > On a 266MHz Geode GX:
> > 
> >   $ time make show-var VARNAME=PKGNAME
> >   gnome-control-center-2.22.2.1
> >    1268.48s real   815.57s user   356.51s system
> > 
> > This is a joke, right?
> 
> Unfortunately, it is a very bad and true joke. One of the reasons is
> that the buildlink3.mk files are loaded and parsed over and over:
> 
> $ strace | grep open | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
>   21021 open("../../mk/bsd.fast.prefs.mk",
...

I did some experiments with a version of make that was hacked
to report its command line on every invocation.
(pkgsrc seems to lose the -d<flags> to some of its recursive makes)

I saw an awful lot of top-level makes being run.
I'm sure some of where definite duplicates and/or not required.

I also found places where some packages definitely do stupid things.
I can't quite recall where, but some packages definitely have the
wrong thing happen when they try to set the passwd file fields.
(Some try to use "\ " to get a space into the gecos field, that
isn't going to work, and, in places, leads to make variable names
that end with a '\'!

        David

-- 
David Laight: david%l8s.co.uk@localhost