On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 03:51:43PM +0200, Dieter Baron wrote:
> : Far more critical is
> : fixing the ftpio support because that is a show-stopper for converting
> : pkg_add to be more useful.
> 
>   What needs fixing?

The whole handling of remote URLs is completely broken. E.g. calling
external FTP and pipe the output of the get command to tar. That is the
biggest issue to avoiding storing anything unnecessary on the local
disk.

> : > 2.2 build binary packages for multiple options settings
> 
> : As long as the package gets different names and I have a variable to
> : select different sets, pbulk can do this already. See
> : mk/pbulk/pbulk-index.mk for the pkgsrc side.
> 
>   I know; that helped shape the proposal.  But we also need support in
> pkg_add for the binary packages to be useful.

I'm not sure about that.

>   I think sooner or later pkg_add will have to consult this file as
> well, and I don't want pkg_add to parse this huge file on each run.

The only reason I can think of that pkg_add should consult pkg_summary
file is to avoid the penalties of http fetch. But if you want to do
that, you have a *local* copy already and just use it to construct the
URLs directly. That can be done with a frontend to pkg_add already and I
think it is the better idea to do that.

>   The only problem I see with distributing it as a text file is that
> it's harder to maintain.  But there already is a tool to help with
> that in pkgsrc-wip, so maybe it's not a big deal either.

The tool is only of limited usefulness. The main problem is that
pkg_info -X is slow and that's a function of the current implementation
more than anything else. I expect it be much, much faster soon.

Joerg