share search, was: Maxima stats huge numbers of files at startup?
Subject: share search, was: Maxima stats huge numbers of files at startup?
From: Raymond Toy
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:30:43 -0500
Robert Dodier wrote:
> On 12/10/09, Harald Geyer <harald at lefant.net> wrote:
>
>
>> However I can confirm that maxima stats each file below
>> maxima/5.19.2/share/ recursively ...
>>
>> I can imagine that this causes problems on slow filesystems.
>>
>> I guess this behaviour is caused by the patch that allows maxima
>> to construct it's search path for share-packages at runtime.
>>
>> Not sure what would be a solution that caters for everyone...
>>
>
> Well, maybe the list can be constructed automatically
> just once when Maxima is built.
> Did we consider that before? I don't remember.
>
This is how maxima worked before, but we sometimes forgot to add share
directories to the list. Doing it automatically relieves us of this
manual task.
I suppose we could have configure build the list for us so we don't
have to. But then we can't later install a new share package (after
installation) and have maxima automatically pick that up. This doesn't
happen very often, I suppose, so the advantage of automatically adding
paths is not so much.
But I think xemacs automatically scans directories to look for its
packages. XEmacs should have a problem too on this system.
Ray