On Fri, 15 Mar 2002, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> One of my machines has been sitting on a 'make index' for the better
> part of 24 hours, with no end in sight.

Yes, the way it was done when there were only a few hundred packages
doesn't scale well.

> Is there a package out there for doing 'make index/readme' a little
> faster?

Not presently. "make readme" is used to generate the web pages on
ftp.netbsd.org, so if such a package existed, we'd be using it instead
of the make macros.

> Also, is it possible to 'turn off' parts of pkgsrc?  For example, I
> don't need anything like kde or gnome.  I use sup to update pkgsrc,
> but I just don't want some things updated or anything.

For "make readme" it wouldn't help anyway -- the page is fully generated
each time, in each package directory. There's no way for "make" to track
dependencies for all the files all over the tree that could affect any
particular package.

> I can't just erase the directories, and I imagine that sup would
> replace any edits I made of package lists.
>
> Is there an official way to effectively turn packages off?

"anoncvs" lets you update selectively, but selective updates aren't
supportable because of the way dependencies for a package are scattered
in other directories all over the tree, and because packages might be
changed in fundamental ways just by changing a line in bsd.pkg.mk,
without changing any of their own files at all.

For the "readme"'s, you might take a look at
{SITE,HOST,GROUP,USER}_SPECIFIC_PKGS, which is explained in
mk/bsd.pkg.defaults.mk.

By the way, all questions about packages are appropriate for the
"tech-pkg" mailing list. The problems with "make readme" have been
discussed many times before, in fact. If you're interested in helping
solve the problem, you might wish to review the archives, then
contribute your own ideas to the list.

Regards,

Frederick