Quoth FRIGN: > I recently thought about porting portage (written in Python) to C and > read into its source code. > Calling it a mess is a compliment, given there are almost no comments > and lots of deprecated functions. > Portage is not only an example for quite unmaintainable code, but also > for a program which as obviously been deployed with the wrong > programming language. > A core package-manager shouldn't depend on python, it should be > statically linked and _fast_.
Quite a few years ago, back when I was using gentoo on a low powered computer, portage was just too memory hungry to run, so I switched to paludis. I think it's C++, so I have no idea if it's sensible under the covers, but it was far more reasonable in terms of resource usage, at least. I quite liked gentoo's ebuild system too. I keep meaning to look at the BSD ports system, which is similar, but never quite get around to it.
