Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2014 21:24:38 +0100 From: Tijl Coosemans <tijl@FreeBSD.org> To: Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@gmx.de> Cc: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Reducing the size of the ports tree (brainstorm v2) Message-ID: <20141103212438.0893c3dc@kalimero.tijl.coosemans.org> In-Reply-To: <54573B31.7080809@gmx.de> References: <20141031185621.GC15967@ivaldir.etoilebsd.net> <54573B31.7080809@gmx.de>
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On Mon, 03 Nov 2014 09:22:09 +0100 Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@gmx.de> wrote: > Am 31.10.2014 um 19:56 schrieb Baptiste Daroussin: >> Hi all, >> >> tijl@ spotted an interesting point, distinfo and pkg-descr files files >> convenient are taking a lot of space for "free", we can reduce the size of the >> while ports tree by a factor 2 by simply merging them into one of the other >> files (Makefile and/or pkg-plist) from my testing it really devides >> significantly the size of the tree. >> >> Problem is how to merge them if we want to. >> >> What we do not want to loose: >> - Easyness of parsing distinfo >> - Easyness to get informations about the description >> >> so far I have not been able to figure out a user friendly way >> >> Ideas I got so far only concerns pkg-descr: >> Adding an entry in the Makefile for the WWW: >> WWW= bla >> or an entry in the plist: @www http... >> >> for the description the Makefile is not suitable as multi line entry in >> Makefiles are painful >> Maybe a new keyword: >> @descr <<EOD >> mydesc >> in >> multiline >> EOD >> >> which could easily be added to the plist parser in pkg. But I'm do not >> find that very friendly in particular for make(1) to extract the data. >> >> Concerning the distinfo I have no idea. >> >> so this mail is a call of ideas :), if nothing nice ideas is found we >> will just do nothing here :) > > My urgent recommendation is to leave it as is. Even if it wastes 200 > MB. Space is so cheap these days it's not worth introducing new > instabilities, re-train all contributors and all that. > > We haven't even shaken off all the staging and pkg fall-out, and now > we're talking about the next revolution. The numbers on http://beefy1.isc.freebsd.org/ and http://beefy2.isc.freebsd.org/ have never been better. > And if we really decided that we want to change things, we would need > these things BEFORE the implementation: > > 1. a clear list of the problems. > 1a. Space does not count, see above. > 1b. Insufficient tools (SVN) do not count. If the tools are bad, we > need other tools, not change our way of doing things. Other tools won't change anything. It's the file system that would have to change which is not going to happen. When the ports tree was created disks were much smaller and file systems were better (still not good) at storing small files. Today disks are much bigger and file systems have adapted to that. Now it's time for the ports tree to adapt. Here's another way to look at it. Suppose that distinfo never existed and we always specified file sizes and checksums in the Makefile. Then someone would come along and suggest to do just that, put file sizes and checksums in a separate file named distinfo. Nobody would support that.
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