Dear Alvaro,
> > As I'm into these files, I can say that one of the reason for that is that
> > the shell scripts in the makefile looks inefficient, with nested for-loops
> > and one-at-a-time config/install-sh forked-script copies for 350 header
> > files, on the 971 files of a standard installation.
>
> Also the install-sh script apparently is way more complex than it needs
> to be.
Maybe. I guess the options are there because they might be useful
sometimes?
> There's probably a lot of that complexity (and subsequent slowness) that
> install-all-headers doesn't need.
Maybe. I don't have a clear view about portability issues that I guess
justify this script.
> A lot of time goes into processing the script itself rather than doing
> useful work.
Yes.
> Is there an objection to trying to convert it to a simpler, faster
> alternative? Maybe even one that receives multiple files as arguments,
> which would reduce the number of times it is called by an order of
> magnitude.
Yes, handling several files at a time could indeed improve the stuff.
But this means changing the syntax somehow, and fixing makefiles...
Also, most unix box have an "install" program which might be more
efficient and which handles several files. I do not know whether it
has all the required facilities.
For instance, apache looks for a "bsd" install program at configuration
time... and a slow but compatible shell substitute is used instead if none
is available. Maybe this can be reused quite simply by postgresql, with
their kind permission. As apache is quite portable, it might be good
enough for pg.
This seems a reasonnable todo objective, but I'm not sure it should be
done for 8.0 as it changes the installation procedure significantly? Well,
maybe it could be done quite quiclky. It does not look too difficult to
implement with apache example at hand.
--
Fabien Coelho - coelho@cri.ensmp.fr
