OpenBSD Ports and Packages Explained

jpkunst writes "As reported on undeadly.org: an interesting interview with OpenBSD developer Marc Espie about the internals of and the philosophy behind the OpenBSD ports and packages system."

Comments

Re:Why Perl?

[Anonymous Coward]

A good reason for perl is that it *works*.

A second good reason is that it's already part of the OpenBSD base install.

A third good reason is that the old package system was in C, and was downright broken.

A fourth good reason is that the current perl system is over 200K of perl code. Try rewriting that in C, and see how big it gets.

Finally, maybe perl isn't that slow... I've rewritten all kind of C/shell code in perl, and it consistently is faster than the old C code. Why ? because I can use smarter algorithms, and better caching. The package system of OpenBSD is another example of the same. Dude, the perl version of pkg_add is about twice as fast as the old perl version.

As far as X font building goes, you can't really know if it's slow because perl is, or if it's slow because there's a large amount of stuff going on. Look at the sizes involved, look how much data is processed, realize that usually, everything gets compressed with gzip.

Now, you can think all you want that it's slow because perl is slow. Well, I've got at least two other reasons for it to be slow.

What you have is an opinion, and not really well informed. How about backing it with some actual facts ?