Custom binary packages?

[lars_the_bear]

Hi all

Sorry, me again

I've just gotten through installing Firefox from source, because (I guess) the binary package didn't match my USE configuration (specifically, I'm avoiding pulseaudio, systemd, and a bunch of other stuff).

The build took about 2.5 hours on my everyday business workstation, which is a reasonable powerful thing.

I'm wondering how long this process would take on the older, under-resourced computers I would also like to run Linux on. I'm not even sure they would have enough RAM for the job, however patient I was. I know there's sufficient resources to run the stuff I want to run, because I've tried with binaries from another distro. But building from source? Um...

So I'm wondering -- is it possible to create a custom binary package for use with Gentoo? For Fedora/Ununtu/etc., I can just create the appropriate rpm/deb file, whose format is well documented. I could build Firefox (etc) on a decent system, using the most generic, lowest-common-denominator compiler settings, package it up, and copy it to the target system.

But, given Gentoo's emphasis on building from source, is this even possible? If it's possible, is it practical?

It's not the end of the world, one way or the other -- at a pinch I could just rsync the binaries from one machine to the other. But that would leave a kind of 'invisible package' on the target, and that feels untidy.

More broadly -- if I had just temporarily fiddled with USE flags to get the binary build of firefox (with all its support for pulse, pipewire,etc) would it actually have worked on a system that lacked all these things? With hindsight, I guess I should probably have tried, before spending the whole day building it from source. But I'm rambling again.

BR, Lars.

[pjp]

[Hu]

The most likely outcome of aligning your USE flags to the ones from Firefox are that it would insist on installing the supporting packages needed to make those flags work.

In the case of Firefox, if you don't want to build it, you could use firefox-bin. Is there a reason you want to avoid that, and also avoid compiling locally?

[lars_the_bear]

[flysideways]

[pjp]

[flysideways]