David Brownlee wrote:
> 	get the package names and dependencies from pkgsrc. Its only
> 	merit is the significant speedup compared to running a make
> 	process for each package.
> 	If we want to keep it, it probably makes sense to pull it out
> 	into a perl module on which they all can depend.

There is another place where we iterate over all packages: the creation
of pkgsrc/INDEX in pkgsrc/Makefile. INDEX also contains the information 
I am interested in (pkgname and package directory).
Generation of pkgsrc/INDEX took 28 min on my machine, so it's more
efficient than running "make show-var" for every package.

> 	My personal preference would be to (over time) migrate to
> 	mandating that all packages start with a first non comment
> 	block of:
> 		PKGNAME=
> 		PKGREVISION=		(optional)
> 	(and automatically derive DISTNAME from PKGNAME as needed).
> 
> 	That would allow very simple and extremely fast parsing in
> 	any script.

I thought in this direction as well.

How do people think about keeping a simple list of interesting tidbits
about a package in the package directory itself?

The information would get updated by the developer working on the
package with a new make target ("make pkginfo").

To get an overview about all the packages we would only need to extract
the lists and concatenate them. No more need to simulate a make process
with perl, just let the developers use the real make in a decentralised
manner.

Maybe we could abuse the distinfo file, which already contains the
generated checksums, to keep this information.

ciao
     Klaus