[GTALUG] MP BIOS Toshiba - semi revival

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 11:17:45PM -0400, Anthony de Boer wrote:
> 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.

Well there is a difference between not optimizing, and purposely
unoptimizing.

> 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.)

But running gentoo you do not recompile the same code each time you boot.
Just doing it once is sufficient.

> 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.  :-)

Debian even has a "reprodueable builds" project going on, hunting down
any package that generates different result each time you rebuilt it,
and fixing them.

-- 
Len Sorensen