From: JamesBritt <james@...>
Date: 2002-11-09T03:11:46+09:00
Subject: Re: CPAN Style installer

>
> > I thought REXML was implemented in pure Ruby?  Why the dependence on
> > libxml?

REXML is pure Ruby.

>
> I didn't ever see REXML complete the parsing of the file - it was too
> slow (I never waited long enough), certainly far too slow to be part of
> the snappy command line tool of my imagination. I could of course have
> been doing something wrong, or stupid. I am prone to such things,
> sans-pair.

I wrote a knock-off script using REXML to slurp in the RAA XML and then download
every file listed.  Yes, it was slow, but parsing the entire file did complete
in a few minutes.  This on an AMD K6 400 MHz with (I think) 256K RAM.

Now, right up front, reading in the entire file before working with the data is
a poor design choice, and had I been willing to spend more time on this I would
have used the REXML stream parser and gotten better performance (and would
likely have used threads to download multiple files at once).

BTW, many of the RAA entries do not have an actual download URL, but rather
point to another HTML page where some user intervention is needed.  This was
almost always the case for anything hosted on Sourceforge.

And, unsurprisingly, many URLs just didn't work.  But I did grab 551 out of
roughly 700 files, which came to 25 MB when tarred and zipped. The uber-sumo
package.


James


>
> -Tom
>
>
>
>