Re: OpenBSD Package Manager

On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 02:16:26PM -0400, H. Ishikawa wrote:
> Hello, I'd like to ask some specific areas of the pkg_add tools.
>
> 1. Why Perl instead of C?
> Perl is comparatively slow, and I think this limits who can contribute
> to the source code. How many developers in OpenBSD are actively doing
> any review of the pkg_add tools code? Would there be any interest in
> porting pkgsrc or pkgng from another BSD, or rewriting it in C?

Perl is a perfect language for a package manager. The bottleneck for
a package manager is 1) network and 2) disk, but never CPU. C may be
faster for CPU-bound operations, but it will be exacly as slow as Perl
when fetching a package over the net or unpacking files on disk.

NetBSD's pkgsrc works on OpenBSD. You're free to use it.

For the other two questions, as with all similar feature requests I've
seen here: The code is there, just fix it and submit a patch.

Cheers,
Kusalananda

> 2. Why no package database file?
> Other package managers like apt-get can fetch a single file that has
> all the package versions/info in it. When I update my packages on
> OpenBSD Current, it is a very slow process. Each package must be
> individually checked for updates, rather than comparing a list of
> what I have to a single list of the newest versions. This makes
> doing updates very painful and I avoid doing it sometimes.
>
> 3. Why so many connections?
> When I tried to investigate why the update was so slow, I saw that
> pkg_add was making one HTTPS connection per package! Tools like
> wget from Linux can reuse a single connection for many downloads.
> Could this be added to pkg_add in OpenBSD?
>
> Thank you.