Re: [gentoo-user] is multi-core really worth it?

[David Haller]

Hello,

On Wed, 22 Nov 2017, Jeremi Piotrowski wrote:
>That being said: if you do a world rebuild you will have lots of packages

that (even without the fetch) spend 40 seconds setting up the emerge
(unpack, prepare (plus eautoreconf))...

>that spend ~40 seconds doing their autoconf run, only to build 2-3 sources
>files.

Well, yes, autoreconf can be slow, configure itself less, but as one
writing both .spec files for rpms and .ebuilds, autotools is _by far_
the best both from a users and a packagers view.

Where's e.g. cmake's equvialent to "./configure --help"? Take defaults
or dig through whatnot spreadout cmake-files to find what -D arguments
to use... *bwah* Or qmake. Or whatnot. Yes. autotools sucks. A lot. 
But it is transparent and easily hackable[1], and the rest sucks a lot
worse.

-dnh

[1] do a "grep" on 'sed .. configure{,.ac,.in}' in ebuilds and patches
    in ${FILESDIR}/ to configure{,.ac,.in} in the portage tree, and/or
    sedding/patching *.m4 files ... That's definitely "hacking" the
    autotools build process which should not be done (a autotools
    tarball is "selfcontained"). But it's so easy, it is done quite
    often, instead of patching up the result, moving files around etc. 
    So easy and convenient, there's even "eautoreconf", even though
    that takes (single-threaded) time to run. But rightly so. Upstream
    is "notoriously" bad... The hoops you have to jump through for a
    clean package with autotools are "walkthroughs" compared to the
    stuff needed for cmake or qmake or ... I recently just gave up on
    a (qmake) package, I just could not find what *.prf, *.pri
    *whatnot file I needed to patch up to do as I needed... And I'm
    not a newbie at patching that stuff.

    And if you're adventurous, go and try patch up libreoffice or
    mozillen ... ;) It's a pain. (BTW: I'm on the former, patching out
    a lot of deps, like, when was the last time, if ever, you needed
    to get a WordPerfect or Zoner Draw file to load?) Yes, all nicely
    "useflagged", 406 lines of -U0 diff ATM with a 576 lines original
    ebuild, but not ready yet ;) And yes, I'm even on the
    "libstaroffice" stuff, and I _do_ have some of those file to load
    and convert for myself...

-- 
>Someone from the society for prevention of cruelty to paper is sure to come
>after me if I suggest ramming it up a HR droid's ass.
Actually, it's that Lumber Cartel (TINLC) Directive (TAND) regarding
inappropriate use of their products.                               -- in asr