Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 16:00:43 -0400 From: Charles Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> To: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> Cc: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Second "RFC" on pkg-data idea for ports Message-ID: <3EBED874-8D85-11D8-B697-003065ABFD92@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <p0602040cbca10a7dbe52@[128.113.24.47]> References: <p0602040cbca10a7dbe52@[128.113.24.47]>
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Hi, Garance-- On Apr 12, 2004, at 11:40 PM, Garance A Drosihn wrote: > The basic idea is to collapse many of the separate files for a > port into a single pkg-data file. The web pages explain why I > think this might be worth doing. Please check them out at: > > http://people.freebsd.org/~gad/PkgData/ [ ... ] > What I'd like is some idea of whether this project is worth > pursuing. If not, then Darren and I will concentrate on some > other, less disruptive project. If people like the general idea > of this project, then we'll see how much of we can do. You have some interesting ideas, but there seems to be a disconnect between the stated goal for this change and what you are actually proposing to do. It seems to me that a project which moved the distinfo or pkg-descr files into the port Makefile-- similar to how pkg-comment/$COMMENT was done-- would result in roughly the same savings of inodes and disk space that your proposal is expected to accomplish, would be easier to do, and would be less intrusive than trying to replace the Makefile with your proposed XML-ish pkg-data format. I remember some of the pain of dealing with the pkg-comment transition: a proposed change that can be done incrementally, or not at all for certain ports (ie, if a port has lots of distfiles, keeping distinfo external is probably easier to maintain) is much easier to accept than an all-or-nothing change that breaks backwards-compatibility. If you do want to pursue the notion of replacing the set of files in a ports directory with your own archive format, perhaps you might start with a less ambitious goal, and find a way of archiving the contents of the files directory into a single file/inode-- perhaps files.tar.bz? Doing so would avoid a lot of the complexity and breakage of changing the port Makefiles into anything else, yet would still accomplish much of the inode/size savings that you want to accomplish... -- -Chuck
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