Re: [gentoo-dev] Portage ebuild cruft

[Brian Harring]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 06:40:23PM +0200, Heinrich Wendel wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Portage is slow? How to make it faster? By removing unused ebuilds!
Define "faster".  All this would do is cut down on a couple of stats 
per pkg; the # of ebuilds per pkg isn't a huge issue, the scanning of 
vdb and Config initialization is what is damned slow. :)

> I wrote a little script to check which ebuilds in portage aren't used
> anylonger, here the result:
>
> Total packages checked: 9076
> Total ebuilds checked: 18662
> Total ebuilds to remove: 4643

Dropping every ebuild that isn't the highest version for the mismash 
of arches isn't really valid.  Granted, people *could* stand to do 
cleansing of old versions in the tree, but the versions they choose to 
support/offer is completely up to the ebuild dev.

> Of course the script can't detect every ebuild situation, so take the numbers
> with care. But still it shows that 1/4 of all ebuilds could be removed. This
> would improve portage performance by at least 1/4
Again, define what aspect of portage performance.  The only thing less 
ebuilds cuts down on is the avg runtime of a cp_list call; cache is 
keyed, so lookup is *typically* constant.
~brian
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