Hi,
I'm chiming in rather late on this debate. Many of you are asking
about whether splitting the ebuilds would make a significant difference
to the testing of the KDE packages.
In order to successfully test every component in KDE, one must compile
and install every component in KDE. At the moment that's a pretty big
task on its own, involving the compilation of some 20 or so rather large
packages. These packages are in large lumps of smaller pieces -- and
you're proposing to distribute KDE in the form of these pieces, rather
than the big lumps that the KDE developers produce.
Just the other night I was pointed to this thread by the discussion
going on in #gentoo-mips. So I figured I'd try a little experiment.
I made a little shell script that unpacked kdebase-3.3.1 into a
directory, ran ./configure (setting the cache file of course), running
make distclean to purge the makefiles, then running ./configure again --
timing it as it did so. I also timed a ./configure -n (as suggested by
hackeron_).
The results:
First Run: 36min 15.996sec
Second Run: 22min 56.704sec
Third Run: 2min 56.696sec
Now, take into account, that kdebase has some 40 or so packages within
it. Add that up, you're looking at more than 2 hours spent sitting in
front of a machine watching a ./configure script. It's even worse if
the work directory is cleaned out and fresh source unpacked.
The machine in question has the following specifications:
Silicon Graphics Indy
CPU: MIPS R4600 SC 133MHz A low end machine by SGI standards
RAM: 256MB 72-pin ECC That's the maximum for an Indy
HDD: 9GB IBM SCSI
OS: Gentoo 1.4.16, compiled for MIPS-III
Personally, I'd much rather keep the monolithic packages as the KDE
developers intended. I think the better way to handle this would be to
set an environment variable... e.g.
# KDE_PKG='+konqueror +kicker +kdm -kicker' emerge kdebase
That gives us the best of both worlds -- it allows us to keep the
monolithic packages for one, secondly, users can still pick what they
want from a given package, and thirdly, it doesn't waste any time
running configure scripts repeatedly. Therefore, this should keep
everyone happy. :-) What do others think?
Reguards,
--
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Stuart Longland -oOo- http://stuartl.longlandclan.hopto.org |
| Atomic Linux Project -oOo- http://atomicl.berlios.de |
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| I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere |
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