Re: [gentoo-dev] Binary release of gentoo

[Matt Thrailkill]

On Thu, 10 Apr 2003 22:34:23 +0300
Dan Armak <danarmak@g.o> wrote:

> Easy for you to say! I and other gentoo devs use 56k dialup, which tyipcally
> sends data at 33.6kbps. Ever tried uploading big stuff at that rate (which
> also blocks your other internet activity)?

I'm sorry, this totally slipped my mind.  That would suck, especially if you're the KDE maintainer.  Your special build server would probably be more desirable then.


> Besides building against GRP would mean a) maintaining a grp chroot
> (reasonable) and b) building every package twice - once for myself, once for
> grp. (No ccache because my cflags are different from grp's). So twice the
> build time. Ugh.

Curious though, how much time is spent trying to build such and such an ebuild until you actually get it right and then finally compile something that works and installs fine on your box?
 

> Making it always include all new (stable) versions of packages (for all
> archs!) would need a lot of compile power though, or rather it would need a
> dedicated compile server (or piece of a cluster). Well, if you the proponents
> of this idea have such a server handy, you can easily enough set it up to do
> this and tell gentoo users they can get packages from there. Adding a feature
> to emerge that'll make it fetch binary packages from a specified server
> should be easy enough. (Although we need to improve the binary package format
> to make it specify metadata like CFLAGS, arch... I don't know if that's been
> done yet.)

Do you think the onus is more on finding machines to compile it all with or machines to host it all with?  I would think that some hotrodder overclocker types, the kind that run Gentoo cause they like watching gcc scrolling in an xterm, would be able to get an impressive distcc farm built out of the boxes they personally own.  Ibiblio probably wouldn't be happy hosting binaries though.


> Well all that you can do you have such a server with a good uplink to spare.
> However we of the project (me personally too) don't think that would be good
> use of such a server, because we think the existing GRP is enough (it can be
> expanded in time, but not so radically as you propose, at least not right
> away. And it's not top priority with us.) So we would like to respectfully
> ask you, if you have such a server, to please donate it to the project :-)

On the subject of GRP being enough, its definately a big step in the right direction.  When I look at Gentoo, I see something that has the potential not just to have the nice features of FreeBSD, but to improve on them and have the capacity to be more bleeding edge.  Not just as a machine to let me build everything with extreme CFLAGS.  Long term, optional binaries of most everything is something I'd like to see, just like what FreeBSD lets you install with pkg_add.  That, and being able to sync my Portage tree to different revisions (like -RELENG_1_4 or -CURRENT or -STABLE or whatever).  But thats longterm and just me, its just my suggestion, you guys are the ones doing the work and I'm thankful for all you've done already.  Am I being too much of a FreeBSD whore?

Btw, how big are the generated packages if you do, say, `emerge -b kde`?

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