[gentoo-dev] what to do when an ebuild needs loads of RAM?

[David Morgan]

Being the user in question, I thought I'd clarify a few things


On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 00:10:15 +0100, Carsten Lohrke <carlo@g.o> wrote:
> On Thursday 18 November 2004 23:42, kosmikus wrote:
> > We have had reports from users who tried to build this package on their
> > 256Mb machines that the ebuild fails (no surprise there) and that the
> > OOM killer takes out X in the process.
>
> Got a similar bug report. But hey, people know that you have to compile from
> source, when using Gentoo. I don't think taking care for every <=500MHz box
> low on ram does make sense. Usually you compile on another box, if you have
> such a target.
>
>
> Carsten
>
>
>

Since when is a machine with 256MB "low on ram"?  (it's also a P4,
though only 1.8GHz, but that's not really relevant) I can usually
compile things whilst listening to music and not lose any
repsonsiveness most of the time. Running out of memory is also
different from having a slow processory - most people probably
wouldn't realise that the reason that X had been killed was that
they'd run out of RAM (especially considering the problems caused by
gcc optimizations not so long ago).


On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 22:55:42 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh <ciaranm@g.o> wrote:

> Naah, I'd go for the warning with maybe an ebeep. If you really must
> have a force thingie, it shouldn't be a USE flag, since USE flags are
> for things which affect the resultant program

The idea isn't to have a USE flag, but to do something like in the
xorg-x11-6.8.0-r{2,4} ebuilds:

pkg_setup() {
	#################################################
	### GET RID OF THIS ONCE THIS EBUILD IS READY ###
	#################################################
	if [ -z "${BREAKME}" ]; then
		die "Set the BREAKME variable to emerge this. It's in development.
Stop using it."
	fi

Except that it only fails if they don't have enough memory and if the
variable isn't set. It's a nasty solution, but it can potentially stop
bug reports about X randomly being killed. (After all, there's a high
chance that someone won't notice any other sort of warning, beep or
no)

> I'd also be veeeeeeery wary about looking for a certain amount of RAM.
> Chances are that the value in question will vary depending upon machine
> and arch.

Agreed, but if you give the user the option to still try the emerge
then it's not so bad. Best solution out of a bad lot IMO...

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