On 2003.03.19 11:23 Per �yvind Karlsen wrote:
why are everyone so obsessed about "optimizing" their packages? in most cases
it only gives marginal perfomance increase and often introduces weird bugs and performance penalties..
Exactly why thing are great the way they are now. i586 -O3 is a perfecly happy medium.
The point is, there are a few programs which exhibit a HUGE speed increase when built for i686/MMX/SSE/whatever. Try transcoding a DVD with our transcode/mjpegtools package. Even on my dual athlon 1900 it takes like 12 hours.
ATLAS and BLAS and LAPACK are another example. I do a lot of computational math, and our packages are about half as fast as ones built locally.
I know there are easy solutions to this. But I thought an easier and cooler one would be some one-command way to install the souped-up package. Isn't this what Mandrake is supposed to be all about?
So either a script, or an extension of urpmi that will fetch the source, rebuild it to your machine's capabilities, and install the new rpm.
Not only is this simple can cool, but it would be a great new "feature" to put in the news.
Austin
--
Austin Acton Hon.B.Sc.
Synthetic Organic Chemist, Teaching Assistant
Department of Chemistry, York University, Toronto
MandrakeClub Volunteer (www.mandrakeclub.com)
homepage: www.groundstate.ca