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Re: [LUG] Debian portage

 

Ben Goodger wrote:
> 
> This should be built in. Anyone looking for a hacking assignment?
> apt-get build-install would be my favourite :)

As Neil suggests, there is very little to be gained but more bugs.

One has to use a consistent set of build tools (toolchain), or at least
a compatible toolchain, which usually restricts the versions of GCC you
can use and still build a working package. Not that GCC has many binary
incompatible upgrades, but it does happen.

However there are people who have set up automated builds of Debian with
other options, the most obvious being additional security features. I
think Steve K documented some experiments with that on his Debian
Administration site. I believe those is love with archaic Intel
processors also did some builds for their own hardware.

Only packages I ever became aware of, that might be significantly
suboptimal on Debian, were some of the multimedia packages, that had
"weird" configure options that enabled special hardware support code.

Unless stuff is CPU intensive, or do a lot of access to physical memory
that can be optimised by prefetching and isn't, I expect benefits to be
marginal. I suspect Firefox is normally limited by network latency, so
using your ISPs cache is probably the biggest win. DNS is already over
optimised to the point of giving incorrect results in both Firefox and
IE, but again using a big local cache like and ISPs name server is still
going to gain a little when visiting a new website. More bandwidth helps
as well.

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