[ILUG] Package dependencies

[James Cooper]

> 
> On Tue, 25 Jun 2002 15:26:24 +0100
> "Brian O'Donoghue" <Brian.ODonoghue at kbs.ie> blurted in message
> 55DA5264CE16D41186F600D0B74D6B091DB076 at KBS01:
> 
> > I'll keep detesting them because they are bloatware mostly compiled for
> > >=p1 in any case besides being unoptimized, but if it makes you feel good
> > >to vent be my guest
> > 
> lets just quote a question from the debian lists..
> 
> no-one has produced one benchmark that _proves_ that a distro is faster
> if you compile it by hand (rather than getting a precompiled version).
> 
> Maybe you'd do us the honour?

It really depends how you compile it and what you mean by faster.
A hand compiled package optimised for an i686 will more than likely
be faster than a precompiled i586 version. However we are talking
cycle counting here and the speed gained would probably be unnoticeable
to the end user except for situations where cycles are precious e.g.
real-time 3d games. But if you know a hand compile will speed stuff up
by a matter of minutes then go for it.

In my experience it's not worth the effort to compile from scratch. It
took me nearly 48hrs constant compiling to get QT2 and KDE2.1 built.
(I recently tried to compile QT3 but one of the files was too big to
compile!)

James