On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 15:45 +1000, Stuart Longland wrote: > Hi, > I'm chiming in rather late on this debate. Many of you are asking > about whether splitting the ebuilds would make a significant difference > to the testing of the KDE packages. > > In order to successfully test every component in KDE, one must compile > and install every component in KDE. At the moment that's a pretty big > task on its own, involving the compilation of some 20 or so rather large > packages. These packages are in large lumps of smaller pieces -- and > you're proposing to distribute KDE in the form of these pieces, rather > than the big lumps that the KDE developers produce. > > Just the other night I was pointed to this thread by the discussion > going on in #gentoo-mips. So I figured I'd try a little experiment. > > I made a little shell script that unpacked kdebase-3.3.1 into a > directory, ran ./configure (setting the cache file of course), running > make distclean to purge the makefiles, then running ./configure again -- > timing it as it did so. I also timed a ./configure -n (as suggested by > hackeron_). > > The results: > > First Run: 36min 15.996sec > Second Run: 22min 56.704sec > Third Run: 2min 56.696sec > > Now, take into account, that kdebase has some 40 or so packages within > it. Add that up, you're looking at more than 2 hours spent sitting in > front of a machine watching a ./configure script. It's even worse if > the work directory is cleaned out and fresh source unpacked. > > The machine in question has the following specifications: > > Silicon Graphics Indy > CPU: MIPS R4600 SC 133MHz A low end machine by SGI standards > RAM: 256MB 72-pin ECC That's the maximum for an Indy > HDD: 9GB IBM SCSI > OS: Gentoo 1.4.16, compiled for MIPS-III
Let me ask a potentially politically incorrect question. How many other distros are there that will even run on this box? Is Gentoo the only Linux hope for a 133 MHz MIPS? How well would a full-blown or even partial KDE run on it? I have a 133 MHz Pentium MMX, admittedly with only 32 MB of RAM. I just barely got Debian Woody to run in it, and KDE (2.something!) was a stretch. It would come up, but it wasn't very responsive. I ended up going to the Enlightenment desktop on it. Funny thing is, this machine (Libretto 70CT, actually) did a very good job with Windows 95, and I've heard of folks successfully running NT 4.0 on them. When is it time to take these old things out behind the barn and shoot them? -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
