I wrote:

> The approach the script htutils/changes/pkg-changes2xml takes (it makes
> an educated guess about the package name without using "make show-var
> VARNAME=PKGNAME") is faster (8 min on an Athlon XP 1500) and uses less
> resources but I wonder whether we have to bite the bullet and run
> "make show-var" (54 min) for every package periodically.

> Maybe people have other ideas how to generate this list efficiently.

Harvard Eidnes pointed to "lintpkgsrc -g" which generates a list of
triples (pkgname pkgdir pkgver). On the efficiency side, it needed 3 min
20s on my machine which makes it the best choice so far. 

All the code (pkg-changes2xml, changes2html, lintpkgsrc) seems to
originate from a single source (David Brownlee) but has diverged, at
least in the latter file from the former two.

ciao
     Klaus