Peter Tribble wrote: > Hi, > > There's an undocumented feature in pkgchk, as reported > in bug 4762083,
Filed by me; I was careful to call it "undocumented behavior" because it's not at all clear it's a feature. > My own view would be to remove > it, as it's undocumented, doesn't work right, and > overlaps with functionality provided by the -P > option (which wasn't present at the time the bug > was filed). Removing it also helps (possibly > significantly) performance, and makes the code > simpler. I can't see it changing performance much; the issue that worries me is what if we ever had a file path with an asterisk in it? Among the many flaws of this alleged feature is there's no way to escape the asterisk. > > One possibility would be to enhance -P to support > regular expressions. That seems a neater way to > address the problem, and actually adds functionality. I suggested that at the time -P was introduced as part of the "use a SQL database for the package info" project that was in S10 beta but was backed off because the performance characteristics weren't completely as expected, and some of the zones work got us much of the performance we wanted without the disruption. The idea was rejected at the time because it seemed too hard to map regexps or shell-style patterns into SQL "LIKE" clauses; it didn't seem so bad to me just to do the filtering after the SQL statement, but the people doing it didn't like that so we just left -P without patterns. Rich
