• Bug#1108845: pkgconf is unusably slow

    From Frank Heckenbach@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jul 6 04:50:01 2025
    Package: pkgconf
    Version: 1.8.1-4
    Severity: important
    Tags: patch

    % time pkgconf --cflags --libs re2 > /dev/null
    real 0m2,902s
    user 0m2,884s
    sys 0m0,008s

    re2 uses libabsl which is quite a monster, yet it only has some 100
    .pc files. Processing them shouldn't take nearly as long.

    This problem is known:
    https://github.com/pkgconf/pkgconf/issues/229

    I can confirm what's written there. Like the OP there, a complete
    build of my software (which just uses re2 in one place) would take
    way over an hour (I had to abort it halfway), more than 20 times as
    long as the actual compilation (which is mostly C++ with
    optimizations -- not exactly known for being fast, either).
    Sorry, that's just ridiculous!

    The version in Bookworm probably has the same problem, but only in
    Trixie there's a version of re2 which uses libabsl, so the problem
    becomes more urgent.

    As described there, upgrading to 1.9.0 fixes the problem. I tested
    this:

    % time pkgconf-1.9.0 --cflags --libs re2 > /dev/null
    real 0m0,019s
    user 0m0,015s
    sys 0m0,004s

    There are newer versions than 1.9.0 which should also fix the
    problem, but if you don't want to change too much so at this point,
    upgrading to 1.9.0 seems the safest option.

    -- System Information:
    Debian Release: 13.0
    APT prefers testing-security
    APT policy: (500, 'testing-security'), (500, 'testing-debug'), (500, 'testing')
    Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

    Kernel: Linux 6.1.0-35-amd64 (SMP w/24 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
    Kernel taint flags: TAINT_WARN
    Locale: LANG=de_DE, LC_CTYPE=de_DE (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to de_DE.UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
    Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
    Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
    LSM: AppArmor: enabled

    Versions of packages pkgconf depends on:
    ii pkgconf-bin 1.8.1-4

    pkgconf recommends no packages.

    pkgconf suggests no packages.

    -- debconf-show failed

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