New comment by Chocimier on void-packages repository

https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/31602#issuecomment-867029335

Comment:
> check only distfiles

homepage and site are important too

> remove all variable except pkgname and version from distfiles

There are templates that use wrksrc, _distver being custom transformation of version and more.

> update-check doesn't need xbps 

It uses dewey version sort with `xbps-uhelper cmpver` and needs to use it more. Current [sort -Vu](https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/blob/471c2d1dd4af758dcd5a450f498439dc25045e34/common/xbps-src/shutils/update_check.sh#L179) sorts beta releases as greater than final releases - so that xupdate updates templates that for some reasons are in `2beta1` version to `2beta2` rather than `2`.

> requires [...] XBPS_ALLOW_CHROOT_BREAKOUT

Is this problem?

> could speed things up a bit

Test was done on templates with `0.` prepended to version to force matches.
There are around 60 packages for which new versions are not detected after that change as for now, not counting R and ruby packages defining distfiles in build style.
Run time of void-updates -p 5 went down by 5min, from 2h 25min to 2h 20min. On same machine, `xbps-src show` for all packages takes around 10 min - limit of what can be expected to improve.
Roughly half of execution time was spent in void-updates' `get_date` - but this is not representative, as there are more found versions that usually.

My conclusion is that this is micro-optimization that doesn't touch real problem pointed by maldridge  - templates being bash programs depending on lot of xbps-src code that are complex to really understand, hard or slow to process for all usecases, like cycle detection.