Bug#779937: GDP shouldn't process all yaml files all the time

[Alexandre Detiste]

Hi,

> To be fair, judging by your shell prompt

And that's the new souped-up version (see uname's 4 cores output),
on the old one a plain "./run" almost nears two minutes
while GDP v37 ran in 0.2 seconds.

On an Amd Duron from 2005 that is still perfect for most
GDP games & Youtube; I get 10 seconds.

> the video core is the main purpose of the RPi's SoC
...and I know many people that use it to watch movies
or play some old games. (Doom has RetroPie plugins)
It's their _only_ Linux computer in their household;
so they would have run GDP on it;
or beg someone to illegaly share generated .debs

> Perhaps if we profiled what takes all the time, we'd be able to avoid it
> - e.g. by "compiling" the parts of the YAML files that are actually
> needed for the argument parser into a pickle file or something, and
> loading the rest lazily.

I did something similar for bash autocompletion, --package option
now knows about about all the packages avaible for each game;
this was a lower-hanging fruit.

Do you mean compiling it during the package build or by postinst script
like the .pyc files ? I guess this pickle format is arch-independant.

> parts of the YAML files that are actually needed
That's only the package name, aliases, longname & demo_for tags.

Cheers,

Alexandre