Re: both native & bytecode

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 09:13:25PM +0200, Berke Durak wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 09:06:33PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 07:21:45PM +0200, Samuel Mimram wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > > 
> > > I have a few comments on your control file, I might be wrong since I 
> > > don't really know ara :
> > > * if you don't need the Graphics or Tk modules, you should depend on the 
> > > -nox versions of the packages (in particular for ara which does not 
> > > require X, I guess). Anyway you don't need to depend on ocaml, 
> > > ocaml-base and ocaml-base-nox since ocaml-base-nox is implied by 
> > > ocaml-base which is implied by ocaml. So I would simply put 
> > > ocaml-nox-3.08 in the Build-Depends.
> > > * Does xara-gtk really use lablgl? (it's in the build-deps)
> > 
> > It is transitivily depended by lablgtk2 anyway.
> > 
> > > * You should not build-depend on ocaml-native-compilers since it is not 
> > > available on some non-native archs. You could depend on 
> > > ocaml-best-compilers but anyway your app is, I guess, small enough not 
> > > to require native compilers when available.
> > 
> > I thought so at first, but had second thought about it. Ara does pretty heavy
> > status file parsing, and it seem to know over 20k packages on my install (sid
> > + some stuff), so altough this is disk bound, a native code version is well
> > waranted (unless i am missing something).
> 
> I second this.  On my machine, the bytecode is 3 times slower than the
> native code, and it makes a usability difference : 2s vs 6s startup
> time on my P4 at 2.4GHz ; ara parses 39658 packages...  On a Pentium
> 120 this would give approx.  20s vs a full minute and many people still
> have these, and ara will be important for these people since they usually
> can't use GTK2 stuff like Xara or Synaptic because it's too heavy.
> 
> Another advantage of native code is that it doesn't depend on Ocaml
> runtime.

This is no problem for debian, since apt-get install ara does the right thing :)

> PS. Thomas, Sven, George : are you all subscribed to debian-ocaml-maint ?

Well, sure i am, i asked for that list in the first place after all :)

Maybe we could even consider making it the ara maintainer, like some other
packages already do.

Friendly,

Sven Luther