is their an interest in prebuilt binaries from portage?

syadnom · Guru Joined: 09 May 2002 Posts: 531

i have a fast machine and i am considering doing so builds of larger packages from portage and offering them for download.

if so, i would build things like KDE and GNOME, OPENOFFICE, MOZILLA. i would build them to a couple different specs like:

if so, i would build these packages for specific CPUs

i run the following machines:

athlon-xp 1600
athlon 1ghz
celeron 1ghz(p3 lineage)
dual celeron 500(p2 lineage)
p4 2.7Ghz

i would build a seperate packaged for each CPU. i have a T1 and would offer them on a per request basis.

i need to know if anyone would be interested

i know a lot of times i wished i could download binaries out of portage optimized for my system because of compile times.

!k · Posted: Thu Dec 12, 2002 3:28 am Post subject:

hmmm... Am I a masochist for liking to see gcc scroll so fast and pretty?

having said that I routinely cook up binaries on my fast machine for the slower ones on the LAN....

max_colby · Posted: Thu Dec 12, 2002 6:21 am Post subject:

Wow, if those are networked, distcc must give you amazing compile times. I believe pre-built binaries are a planned option for Gentoo 1.4, for some major packages such as the ones you've described, so I'm sure many users would be interested in this.

I like the idea of being able to get older systems up and running in a reasonable amount of time. - I've become so spoiled by emerge that the big perk of Gentoo isn't customization, but having such a slick package management system.

syadnom · Guru Joined: 09 May 2002 Posts: 531

id have to say that the big perk of gentoo is portage as a package management system rather than a source distribution system. I would sertainly say that portage MUST have source code for those people that want to compile for speed but prebuilt binaries wouldbe great.

for instance , you could merge your whole system and be up and running very quickly, and then at night sometime in the future, you could emerge -e world.

a nice rebuild world script would be nice, you could run the script and it would grep the list of emerge -e world -p and then execute each line at a time and delete the corosponding entry, so you could build at night when your not using the computer. - i say this because an emerge -e world will try to rebuild the entire system from scratch and their is really no way to stop and then start again without starting from the beginning(that im aware of)

gentoo1.4 final is due out this month right?

oh, id also like to see an entire system package, or a couple different ones.

for instance.

emerge system-gnome
or
emerge system-kde

and you would download a prebuilt system for gnome or kde and all you would need to do is built your kernel and set up fstab and your networking.

---

my main issue with gentoo is the time from the start of install to a working desktop. im fine with recompiling things after the system is up and going.

syadnom · Guru Joined: 09 May 2002 Posts: 531

by the way, i thought of the /etc/ files that would be installed from the prebuild system, i think thier should be a switch that portage can trigger and the user can trigger to NOT modify anything in /etc/ upon emergeing a package. this would only really be usefull if you were recompiling an existing system with intact config files but it is a though..

purhaps i should like this thread to the portage reccomendations forum.

rac · Posted: Fri Dec 13, 2002 5:47 am Post subject:

How were you planning on handling USE flags? If getting something installed and running quickly is your goal, why not just install an easy-to-install binary distro, any one, and then install Gentoo niced in a terminal window in a chroot? If you want portage to manage binary package distribution, why not just use dpkg and apt-get? Graceful management of conditional compilation is the crucial feature of Portage, IMHO.

I'm sure everybody is tired of hearing me say it, and the fact that this grassroots binary distribution topic keeps coming up is obviously proof that few people agree with me, but I think that different design tradeoffs make sense for source distros and for binary distros, and that attempting to become both will make for a muddle of mediocrity.
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