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Date:      Wed, 09 Oct 2002 11:28:49 -0400 (EDT)
From:      John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Mark Murray <mark@grondar.za>
Cc:        current@freebsd.org
Subject:   RE: src/games bikeshed time.
Message-ID:  <XFMail.20021009112849.jhb@FreeBSD.org>
In-Reply-To: <200210091029.g99AT8hb009974@grimreaper.grondar.org>

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On 09-Oct-2002 Mark Murray wrote:
> Hi
> 
> The current flare-up over src/games/wargames reminds me that we are
> carrying a bunch of Really Old Stuff in usr/games/.
> 
> Yes folks, its that time of the year.
> 
> I ask myself, "why are we wasting ``make world'' time and install
> bandwidth on 1970's-era games?".

Umm, you have _got_ to be kidding me.  I can understand "it's buggy
code that can give l33t games GID privileges!" arguments, but _not_
build time arguments.  Many of the games have one source file.
Including header files there is a whopping 3142k of C sources under
games/.  Spread across 41 games that is an average of 76k per game.
/usr/bin/lint has 504k of src.  That's 6 games.  I think we should
axe lint from the tree because the sheer TRAUMA from watching my
machines LABOR through compiling all of lint(1) during that time
that I happen to blink is giving me massive headaches.  In fact, I'll
have my lawyers be sure and mail you the medical bills.  I'm sure this
is going to involve lots of therapy.

Realistically.  On my laptop with X running, mail client running, me
typing this message, etc.  Doing a fresh build of all of games
(including obj, depend, and all) took a whopping 1 minute and 49.70
seconds.  Wow, that's such a major bit of time.  If I had gotten up
to get a soda from the soda machine it would have finished before
I had gotten back.  The horror!  World builds on my laptop usually
take about 1.5 hours, or 90 minutes.  Let's round the games time up
to 2 minutes for easy math.  That means that src/games takes up a
whopping 2.2% of the world time.  And this is on PIII-700 with the
slower-than-molasses-in-january gcc 3.2.1 with -march=pentium3 (all
the extra optimizations make it slower).  Moving over to my test box
here at work we have a P4 2.4ghz that takes about, oh, 19.5 minutes
to build all of world (4.x).  It's a bit fudgy, but let's just assume
the 2.2% factor.  That comes out to about 26 seconds.  I think in the
time this thread has taken in the form of reading and writing messages,
games could have been built at least 100 times.

Find a real argument.  Build time is not a real argument.  wargames(6)
was pretty stupid, but I don't see a reason to remove the rest of the
games.  There is a NOGAMES option for those of you who really don't
want them to "inflate" (*cough*) your build times.

> As fortune(6) has a strong maintainer and follower base, removing that
> would be premature.

s/premature/a request for people to take out a contract on me/

If you can find a real argument for removing the games that makes the
change necessary, then so be it.  However, build time is not such an
argument (esp. with NOGAMES) and we don't need to make change just for
the sake of change.  This is a personal preference just like your ttys
change was.

-- 

John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!"  -  http://www.FreeBSD.org/

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