[gentoo-amd64] Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop?

[Duncan]

Mark Knecht posted on Tue, 25 Apr 2017 10:43:29 -0700 as excerpted:

> 3) Respectfully, I'm not sure your answer encompasses the problems and
> frustrations of having to maintain OTHER people's computers. I don't
> hear you speak of that very often. The problem with KDE is on my wife's
> computer. When it's building KDE it's unavailable to her. In the past 2
> weeks I've had two massive builds that each took about 24 hours. That
> amounts to about 15% downtime on her machine,

What I'm trying to say, tho, is that if you set it up right, you'll only 
be building once, for your machine, or at least /on/ your machine if it's 
a package you don't yourself use, and will then be using already built 
binpkgs on her machine.

So effectively it's like using a binary distro on everything except your 
build machine, only the binary distro will be customized with your chosen 
gentoo profile, USE flags, etc.

IOW, bigger picture, the gentoo as metadistro idea, with you effectively 
creating the customized binary distro out of it with the build on your 
machine, that you then install on your wife's machine, and however many 
more you have around that you maintain or help maintain.

Now depending on how similar the machines and layouts are, you may still 
end up building a /few/ packages individually for each or at least some 
of the machines, but if you choose your battles (packages) well, it'll be 
perhaps 10% of them, and "big" packages like gcc, firefox or chromium, 
etc, will only be built once.  Tho if you have say kde on some and xfce 
on others, you might be building one or the other of them for perhaps one 
machine only, and certainly, kde at least is big, but still, if you're 
building for say 10 machines and a few packages are only used on one or 
two, with another few that you have to rebuild custom for each one, you 
might be building in total say 120% or 150% or even 200% of what you'd 
build for a single machine, but that's still way better than the 1000% 
(100% * 10) that you'd be building if you did each one individually.

And while not /exacty/ the same as you'd get with all individual builds 
(the 1000%), it'd still be way closer to fully customized individual 
builds then the generic target mass distribution build you'd get using a 
normal binary distro.

Meanwhile, the per-machine update and admin time, for other than that 
first build machine, would be very nearly the same as you'd spend with a 
mass binary distro anyway, and actually possibly less than the time you'd 
spend if you were splitting distros and having to keep up with the 
different ways different distros did things.

At that point the update and admin time on your wife's machine would 
probably be /less/ staying with gentoo, because you'd be doing binpkg 
installs with already-built packages done on your main machine, and being 
gentoo, you'd know it better and be more effective at admin, so you'd 
actually spend less time on the admin side than you would if it were the 
only machine you had running ubuntu (or fedora or whatever), and thus 
dealing with any changes to config for the first and only time on her 
machine.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman