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

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

On Sun, Mar 13, 2016 at 11:44:15AM +0100, Martin Husemann wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 13, 2016 at 01:58:38AM +0000, Andreas Theodosiou wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Oh, I didn't intend to urge you to cut down time estimates, I just
> wanted to point out that you should provide possible extensions.
> The time is hard to guess, as it highly depends on the source code of the
> tool you are converting - assuming you will be familiar with posix_spawn
> itself after the second or third tool.
>

I think I will go with conservative estimates in my proposal to be on
the safe side.

> > 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?
>
> A few builds and time(1) should be good enough for this, no specific
> program needs to be written, but you need to think about what tests
> exactly you want to run (and check how stable the timings are ...)
>

I will include test cases in my proposal and as Aleksej points out, I
will plan to run the tests seceral times to evaluate the stability of
the timings.

I believe that test cases can be split into three categories:

* Build a single package.
* Build a set of packages.
* Build the NetBSD installation image.

> > Possible extensions could be implementing posix_spawn in system(3) and in
> > shells/bash.
>
> Good, maybe you can find a few more like that? popen(3) maybe?
>

popen(3) can be added as an extension as well as lang/nawk and lang/perl5.

> Please make sure in the proposal to separate NetBSD base system changes,
> pkgtool changes and individual pkg patches (I suppose most items will be
> in the last category).
>
> Martin

Indeed, at the moment I am looking at two NetBSD base system changes and
the rest are individual pkg changes.

Best regards,

Andreas