On Thu, 2022-04-21 at 15:49 +0300, Dex Conner wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> So I've found a Thinkpad X200 online and I'm thinking of buying it for
> libreboot purposes. Do you think the P8600 cpu can handle all the
> compiling on gentoo? For the record, I don't have any of the "big stuff"
> like KDE, GNOME, Firefox (all I have is Tor Browser [which I don't
> compile], dwl and some terminal programs like neomutt and profanity).
> Surely, I wouldn't be spending 5 hours to do small upgrades,
> right?..right?
>
>
It's getting harder and harder. There's always GCC, which is going to
take you most of the day to build and will probably require -j1 to keep
you from running out of memory. But aside from that, the big ones are
* dev-lang/rust: pulled in by anything that needs SVG support unless
you unmask an old insecure version of librsvg or can tolerate half-
broken SVG support. This takes over 24h, requires -j1, and gets
worse every day because it bundles all of its (growing list of)
dependencies.
* LLVM: needed by rust, some video cards, and certain picky packages.
This one is at least _legitimately_ large but has annoying point
releases every once in a while that trigger a rebuild for little
benefit. Again, expect ~24h.
* net-libs/webkit-gtk: if you're avoiding firefox (which is huge,
and requires rust, which is huge), then this is your best bet for
a browser engine. Even if you don't use it directly, other apps
like evolution (mail client) can pull it in. It too is huge, just
not as bad as the others. This one finishes in something like 18h
for me.
Everything else that's packaged well and uses a sane programming
language shouldn't give you much trouble.
