Compiling all the time

gvs · n00b Joined: 29 May 2004 Posts: 45 Location: EU - Belgium

I have been using Gentoo on a couple of systems for a long time now.
It has always served me well and I liked having early access to new releases (like KDE).

A couple of months ago, I became a father. I'm now discovering how hard it is to keep my machines updated (even with security patches). I start to feel that I spend all my time on the computer compiling, were I used to just run emerge in the background when doing other stuff, but the time spend on my computer is rather limited.

I'm looking in to replacing my desktops with a binary distro again. MEPIS seems not to bad (Yoper has some appeal, but it was horribly unstable when I tried it). I've always like debian, but their unstable branch does not get security updates, and stable is so very, very old.

Does anyone have any suggestions to make it easier to stick with Gentoo? Recommendations for good binary distributions are also welcome.
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BlackEdder · Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2004 10:48 am Post subject:

I would just stop compiling

If you have an hardware router you shouldn't need to keep up to date too much. Then you can just update when you know you need a certain feature.
Another option would be automation. It shouldn't be to hard to let glsa-check do the compiling every night, just at a cronjob.

As on binary distributions I would try out ubuntu I guess....

gvs · n00b Joined: 29 May 2004 Posts: 45 Location: EU - Belgium

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20099

How about you pick a set amount of time to do "Gentoo" work? It could be an hour per week, or 30 minutes every couple of days or something. If you can make it consistant, you can run a cron job that outputs "emerge -vuDp world" to a file that you can review, then you can decide what to upgrade and walk away, or do whatever.
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Jengu · Guru Joined: 28 Oct 2004 Posts: 384

If you have multiple comps in your house, setup distcc. That'll reduce the compile time significantly. Even your windows boxes can help with cygwin (I understand that this is possible but haven't found a good guide yet though).

Drooling Iguana · Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2004 7:26 pm Post subject:

Why not just start an update before you go to bed or to work? You don't need to be at the computer for Portage to do its work.

Imek · Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2004 7:37 pm Post subject:

ralph · Advocate Joined: 02 Mar 2003 Posts: 2001 Location: Hamburg

1. Stick to strictly x86 as you will have only few compile problems then.
2. Just let it update once a week at night if possible.
[Edit]
3. Make sure only those things that you really need are installed as that will speed up upgrading considerably. (I know what I'm talking about...)

If you want a binary distro I'd also recomend Ubuntu, it's very nice (but as you already said, it's gnome focused).
If you prefer kde mepis probably isn't a bad choice. So far I have just used it as a LiveCD, but even then it was quite impressive.
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contranj · n00b Joined: 12 Dec 2004 Posts: 8

arch linux is a very good distro... powerful enough to be compared to gentoo but all binary

www.archlinux.org

i tried ubuntu, and didn't like it too much.

not a fan of rpm / apt-get

arch has a packaging system similar to gentoo, but again, all binary.

rezza · Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 12:41 am Post subject:

cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3355

just set a cron job for the time and day each week (or whever)
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gvs · n00b Joined: 29 May 2004 Posts: 45 Location: EU - Belgium

gvs · n00b Joined: 29 May 2004 Posts: 45 Location: EU - Belgium

mhodak · Veteran Joined: 15 Nov 2003 Posts: 1218

You do not need to babysit the compilation, if it is working, it is working, if it breaks I do not see why you have to know about it immediatelly. Also, you do not need to constantly test that everything works after each update, if something does not work you will find out about it when you use the application. I am using Gentoo for over a year and I had very few broken packages. You need to have some faith in the distro you are running, if you upgrade X check a few basic apps if you want to be sure that things are working but that should be about it.

What can help you minimize number of broken packages is:
1. Only install packages that you use
2. Stick to stable (x86)
3. Use conservative CFLAGS: -O2, which already contains enough optimizations so that your system will be fast.
4. Run revdep-rebuild on regular basis

What could save you time is to let cron handle some work overnight, syncing, checking for updates, you can even have it to build binary packages for you which you can install later quickly.

What I do is I let cron to do sync, check for updates and run revdep-rebuild. I update baout 2-3 times a week and there is usually only few packages that need to be upgraded. But even if the compile would take a long time, I just let portage to do its thing in the backgorund while I do other things. I run gkrellm, so I can see (while I am working on something else) if computer still compiles stuff or whether it is finished.

From my experience I can say that time required to keep gentoo up-to-date is very low.

rmbalfa · Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 9:30 pm Post subject:

I just switched to Arch Linux because I no longer have the patience to compile things on my 700 MHz box. It is OK. I still prefer Gentoo, but again, the compile times got to be too much for me.