Ports relat­ed stuff

The pack­age depen­den­cy speedup was com­mit­ted by port­m­gr, unfor­tu­nate­ly it was not the lat­est ver­sion of it. The most recent ver­sion is sched­uled for an exper­i­men­tal ports build run (my patch also con­tains the pos­si­bil­i­ty to switch of the reg­is­tra­tion of implic­it depen­den­cies, if enabled it gives a much bet­ter pic­ture regard­ing which port needs to be rebuild (portre­vi­sion bump) in case a depen­den­cy changes).

Patch­es for speed­ing up “make clean” are also sched­uled for an exper­i­men­tal ports build run. The pkg_create patch was also com­mit­ted to ‑cur­rent.

With all those stuff an update is much faster now, at least for those ports where the compile/build time was much low­er than the infra­struc­ture pro­cess­ing (I doubt you will see a sig­nif­i­cant change in a build of OO 😉 ).

Speed­ing up the pack­age depen­den­cy list creation

Stephen Montgomery-Smith post­ed some patch­es for bsd.port.mk to the ports mail­inglist to speed up the pack­age depen­den­cy list cre­ation. He did cut down the time from about 2min30sec (pack­age depen­den­cy list of gnome2, test­ed on my sys­tem) to about 15 – 18sec. I enhanced this and now the time is down to about 12sec and a lot less pro­grams to exe­cute in the call (may be impor­tant on slow systems).

The patch for bsd.port.mk in my ports-patches direc­to­ry con­tains more than only those improve­ments, the oth­er part is not sub­ject to sub­mis­sion yet.

If nobody finds some prob­lems with the patch I will send it to GNATS and assign it to port­m­gr for inclu­sion into one of the next exper­i­men­tal ports builds.

Bikesheds, FC4 and SoC

The last week has seen some bikesheds. One of them was my com­mit of the doxy­gen infra­struc­ture for the ker­nel sub­sys­tems. Some peo­ple don’t like the way doxy­gen requires some markup tags in the com­ments, some peo­ple don’t think such API docs pro­vide addi­tion­al val­ue and some peo­ple fear that 3rd par­ty devel­op­ers may use some func­tions which should­n’t be used. I don’t repeat the counter-arguments of myself and oth­er peo­ple here, but there are peo­ple out there which already make use of the cur­rent unsat­is­fac­to­ry doxy­gen out­put and are hap­py about this infra­struc­ture. Luck­i­ly is was super­seed­ed by anoth­er bikeshed (and gnn@ wants to work on doc­u­ment­ing a sub­sys­tem to show the ben­e­fits to those peo­ple which do not think yet, that this is a good idea). On a relat­ed issue, I’m wait­ing on a repo copy of src/sys/doc to src/tools (it’s one of two repo copies I’m wait­ing for, ncvs@ seems to be bussy ATM). Some doc@ peo­ple think it is more appro­pri­ate there.

The FC4 lin­ux base port and the xorg based lin­ux X11 libs port are sched­uled for test­ing in an exper­i­men­tal ports build run, we may see the switch of the default lin­ux base port in the not so dis­tant future. It seems Boris is work­ing on updates to the rest of the lin­ux­o­la­tor infra­struc­ture in the Ports Col­lec­tion (gtk, …), so we may see a lot of updates there after the switch of the default lin­ux base port.

In the last days I also helped/talked with my SoC stu­dents. Roman is play­ing a lit­tle bit with an amd64 tin­der­box he got access to and as a result he com­mit­ted sup­port for build­ing the lin­ux­o­la­tor on amd64 as a mod­ule to per­force (call for testers: he did send a patch to emulation@, please give it a try if you own an amd64 box). Ryan is cat­a­loging the IOCTL’s and their sta­tus (imple­ment­ed, obso­lete, …) in the FreeB­SD wiki. I already pri­or­ized those he did so far, and gave some sug­ges­tions how to pro­ceed with the impor­tant ones. This way he has­n’t to wait for me or Ariff when he is fin­ished with the cat­a­loging (being a men­tor liv­ing in a dif­fer­ent time zone means you should be ahead of your stu­dent… being ahead even before he is able to asks ques­tions is … a boost for your own ego 😉 ).