[GTALUG] MP BIOS Toshiba - semi revival

[Anthony de Boer]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> Recompiling serves no purpose.  Do you want to first recompile the
> compiler before compiling the OS?  What are you going to compile the
> compiler with?  How far down do you want to go?

Too much of a modern system is in various scripting languages, which
do effectively that everytime you run them.  Granted, so long as you're
not doing tight inner loops in a script the performance hit isn't as
bad as it can be.  Shell scripts that forked N things per loop iteration
used to really crawl along, though the fact we had a couple of dozen
users on a 386 running SVR3 might have had something to do with it too.

Optimization is getting to be a lost art.

> I think source distributions like gentoo are stupid, but at least they
> only compile things once.  They aren't that crazy.  Some people like what
> they can do with tweaking the settings and turning features on and off.
> I prefer things that are tested and work and don't waste tons of CPU
> time compiling what the distribution could have already compiled.

Part of the reason I run Gentoo is to have the source code aboard my
system and be sure the binaries were compiled from exactly that; their
infrastructure facilitates that and the build process has to be robust
enough to work on various strange folks' machines.  (The other part was
at the time wanting something as unlike an RPM-based distro as possible
due to having had enough of that for awhile.)

Crazy would be taking something like Debian or Red Hat where you're
supposed to love and run their distributed binaries and recompile them
all yourself and find out how many builds only worked that once and are
irreproduceable.  But someone somewhere has to keep them honest.  :-)

-- 
Anthony de Boer