Hah, I've been using Gentoo for almost a year now, and I'm still working on getting things setup right! Gentoo is the best!
Anything that is written in C++ (X.org, mozilla, kde, openoffice, etc) takes a very long time, and a *lot* of memory to compile. This is mostly because gcc is fairly slow at compiling C++. Gcc recently gained pre-compiled header support, which should improve things dramatically, but none of the C++ packages take advantage of this yet. The level of optimization you choose has a major impact on compile time. I suggest either -Os or -O2 for your level of optimization. For me (pentium4, 512k L2 cache) those both give consistently good performance. Somethings are faster with -Os, and some are faster with -O2, but only by about 5%. I use -Os because it takes a little less time to compile. -O3 gives me wildly varying performance, being 20% faster on some things than -O2, but 20% slower on other things. For me, I update every few days. I do an 'emerge --sync', then an 'emerge -Duv --pretend world' so I can see what has been changed. Then an 'emerge -Duv --fetchonly world' to download all of the sources. If there are a lot of updates, or if they are large C++ packages I will usually wait until I go to bed before doing the 'emerge -Duv world'. Nothing on my system (3Ghz P4 1G ram) takes more than a few hours to compile, so it is always finished when I wake up in the morning. Then do an 'etc-update', reboot, and it is finished. As far as the number of updates, I would say it is 2-3 per day usually. But of course, once the system is up and running, you have a great deal of control over what to update and when. I update everything (emerge -Duv world), but you can choose to update individual packages if you wish, or just security updates, or ... As a side note, a few weeks ago I decided to rebuild the whole system with '-Os'. So I did an 'emerge -Dv --emptytree world'....the whole process took about 30 hours! -Richard Harry Putnam wrote: >Being a new user, I'm wanting to get an overview of what an average >gentoo user might do or need to do over a 6mnth period. > >I installed 3 days ago and am still getting things setup. Seems like >an awfull lot of time has gone into emerging stuff I wanted installed. > >Now it turns out there is an update to portage and my system is >telling me it needs to update portage and then update the already >installed packages. 2 more huge chunks of time lost to compiling. > >An activity that seems so intensive that I have been reluctant to and >doubted the advisability of installing or making configs during the >compile process. > >So far I've spent a very lot of time waiting for something to finish >emerging. It seems like things like Mozilla take an extrordinary >long time. > >I'm wondering what a user might see over 6 mnths. How many portage >updates in that amount of time. Howmany `update worlds'. > >-- >gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list > > > > -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
