reducing build times; selecting specific clang targets

[Michael Butler]

On 12/09/17 02:50, Ed Schouten wrote:
> Hi Michael,
> 
> 2017-12-09 4:57 GMT+01:00 Michael Butler <imb at protected-networks.net>:
>> As clang builds for multiple targets unconditionally, it takes *days* to
>> build on one of my devices (700MHz Pentium-3).
>>
>> Is there a way to restrict the build targets to i386 only? If not, can we
>> implement one?
> 
> Regardless of the discussion of how and whether this may be
> implemented, do take into consideration that the target specific bits
> in Clang only account for a minority of the build time. It is not as
> if Clang is literally built multiple times, once for every
> architecture. The build will likely still take several days, even if
> this got fixed.
> 
> Have you considered doing builds on some other system and copying the
> results over? According to Wikipedia, they stopped producing Pentium
> III CPUs 14 years ago. Using these systems to do actual builds sounds
> like a waste of electricity.
> 

Far less than the electricity consumed by an entire planet's worth of 
BSD systems building for targets they'll never use.

The target system is in a remote data-center to which I have limited 
access and is the only remaining one of its type in my network. The old 
installer used to be able to select a set of source archives from which 
to update but I don't see that functionality in any of the current 
tools. What did I miss?

	imb