I'm looking for something that will work with the existing framework.
But yes, I get the feeling that maybe using "make" to process the ports
might be the source of the problem. Make is a program primarily
designed for figuring out which was made first, the target or the
source, but in the ports what we really want is a scripting language
that presides over "cd WKSRC; make".
(P.S. sorry for top-posting, but I am following your lead.)
Bakul Shah wrote:
Not quite what you asked for but...
Given the size and complexity of the port system I have long
felt that rather than do everything via more and more complex
Mk/*.mk what is is needed is a ports server and a thin CLI
frontend to it.
This server can store dependency data in an efficient manner,
deal with conditional dependencies, port renames, security
and what not. It can build or fetch or serve packages,
handle updates etc. Things mentioned in UPDATING file can
instead be done by the server. In general it can automate a
lot of stuff, remove error prone redundancies etc. If it is
small enough and written in C, it can even be shipped with
the base system instead of various pkg_* programs.
It can provide two interfaces, one for normal users (with
commands like add, check, config, delete, info, search,
update, which) and one for port developers (command for
adding/remove/renaming ports, etc.). Initially it must work
with existing Makefiles.
I have been thinking a lot about looking for speed increases for "make
index" and pkg_version and things like that. So for example, in
pkg_version, it calls "make -V PKGNAME" for every installed package.
Now "make -V PKGNAME" should be a speedy operation, but the make has to
load in and analyze bsd.port.mk, a quite complicated file with about
200,000 characters in it, when all it is needing to do is to figure out
the value of the variable PKGNAME.
I suggest rewriting "make" so that variables are only evaluated on a
"need to know" basis. So, for example, if all we need to know is
PKGNAME, there is no need to evaluate, for example, _RUN_LIB_DEPENDS,
unless the writer of that particular port has done something like having
PORTNAME depend on the value of _RUN_LIB_DEPENDS. So "make" should
analyze all the code it is given, and only figure it out if it is needed
to do so. This would include, for example, figuring out .for and .if
directives on a need to know basis as well.
I have only poked around a little inside the source for make, but I have
a sense that this would be a major undertaking. I certainly have not
thought through what it entails in more than a cursory manner. However
I am quite excited about the possibility of doing this, albeit I may
well put off the whole thing for a year or two or even forever depending
upon other priorities in my life.
However, in the mean time I want to throw this idea out there to get
some feedback, either of the form of "this won't work," or of the form
"I will do it," or "I have tried to do this."
Best regards, Stephen
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