Re: Spawn support in pkgsrc tools - Google Summer of Code 2016

[Andreas Theodosiou <andreas%atheod.net@localhost>]

On Sat, Mar 12, 2016 at 11:47:53PM +0100, Martin Husemann wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 12, 2016 at 04:02:43AM +0000, Andreas Theodosiou wrote:
> > I would really like to hear some feedback on this project so that I can
> > work further on developping a full project proposal. I would greatly
> > appreciate an opportunity to contribute to the community.
>
> I would especially like to see a timeline, more details about the
> proposed performance evaluation.
>
With regards to a timeline. I will make sure to include detailed one in
my project proposal. I would like to break the project into the
following three phases:
* Study source code so as to become familiar with the code base.
* Implement code changes.
* Test and performance evaluation.

I would allocate one week to the first item on the list, four to five
weeks for the second item, and four to five weeks for the third. I have
allocated about one week for implementing the code changes to each of
the tools mentioned in my original message. I will also spent time
reading code during the drafting of the proposal so perhaps the first
item can be allocated even less time. Please fell free to advise me on
possible corrections, I could use the opinion of more experienced
developers.

As far as performance evaluation goes, after a discussion with Aleksej
it is my opinion that instead of writing tests, testing use case
scenarios such as the time taken to build a package, or a set of
packages would offer greater insight into the impact of the code
changes. At this point I would like to ask the prefered method of
evaluating execution time in NetBSD. Would a sh script that uses time(1)
and then logs the output suffice? Should a specific program be written?

> You should also offer some optional extensions - it may happen that you
> are done with the code changes in three weeks :-)
>
> Martin

Possible extensions could be implementing posix_spawn in system(3) and in
shells/bash.

Andreas