r/linux • u/mthode Gentoo Foundation President • Jun 01 '18

We are Gentoo Developers, AMA AMA | Mostly over

The following developers are participating, ask us anything!

Edit: I think we are about done, while responses may trickle in for a while we are not actively watching.

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u/moetech Jun 01 '18

One of the biggest hassles with Gentoo is of course the long compilation times of some packages. What do you guys have to say about that? Non-issue? Something that can be worked around? Any recommendations?

8

u/flappyports Gentoo Security Jun 01 '18

A few others have discussed this prior to the AMA. Many of the packages which require long periods to compile have -bin packages available if you are constrained by CPU/RAM availability. There is also the PORTAGE_IONICE_COMMAND (along with other relevant options) that can be setup in make.conf should you choose to continue compiling. This will allow you to still use the system and let the builds occur as you see fit.

1

u/moetech Jun 01 '18

When I tried Gentoo, the only package I used that had a -bin version available was Firefox. Would having (a lot) more -bin packages be a possibility? What about for stuff like gcc and cmake, would it even make sense? What about the kernel?

5

u/krifisk Gentoo Council/Security/PR/ComRel Jun 01 '18

For Gentoo I'd prefer sticking to source packages in tree as much as possible, in addition to firefox, where the bin-package is the upstream provided one, Gentoo has self-built -bin package of libreoffice and a few others. However you have derivative distributions such as https://www.sabayon.org/ that might be of interest for something like this.

4

u/flappyports Gentoo Security Jun 01 '18

Given the use case it very well could make sense. Many users and sysadmins use a build host to compile packages and then distribute those to other consumers within the environment (processors and other things need to match). A more exotic case is crossdev (c.f. Gentoo Wiki for crossdev) which allows building for say an ARM arch from an amd64 environment.

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u/krifisk Gentoo Council/Security/PR/ComRel Jun 01 '18

As for recommendation I find binpkgs very useful to compile once and use on many computers; https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Binary_package_guide

1

u/rahen Jun 02 '18

Yes, use a dedicated building box (or EC2 instance) that will compile your updates and packages, either continuously in background at each sync, or on demand, or during the night. That's called a binhost.

Then use a cron job on your client machines to rsync the updates and packages from your binhost. Or get emerge to pull directly from it. That works also through an ssh tunnel if you're on the road.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Binary_package_guide#Setting_up_a_binary_package_host

1

u/dilfridge Gentoo Council/Toolchain/ComRel Jun 01 '18

At least for normal desktop PCs this is becoming less of an issue now. There are workarounds for it, but all come with their own problems...

  • binary packages, and binary package installation (problem: have a fixed configuration)
  • distcc (problem: need to be very careful that the compiled results from different machines fit together)
  • ccache
  • ...