John Marino has created two custom make variables – .MAKE.DF.OSREL and .MAKE.DF.VERSION. (They return the current DragonFly versioning, if you can’t tell from the name.) Apparently, if you build all 22,000 or so ports together, about 15% of the total time is just awk looking up the system version, and this removes that repeated task.
A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
To be clear, that is 15% of the time to *scan* all 25000 port candidates before the port builds. I’ve since cut off 40% of the scan time, although a big improvement involving python hasn’t gone in yet (it’s pending in freebsd review)
So, what percent of the total build time is 15% of the scan time?
negliglible unless you are waiting for it to complete. (A full build is approaching 60 hours depending on how else the builder is loaded)
Scanning is the activity that figures out dependencies, checks for tree validity and helps define build order. It takes several minutes.