SV: Compile time for kde

[Joshua Tinnin]

(cc'ed to the list)

On Wednesday 02 February 2005 07:06 am, peter.lidell at post.dk wrote:
> -----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
> Fra: Joshua Tinnin [mailto:krinklyfig at spymac.com]
> Sendt: 2. februar 2005 15:56
> Til: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Cc: Xian; Peter Lidell, PDI
> Emne: Re: Compile time for kde
>
> On Wednesday 02 February 2005 06:41 am, Xian <ian at codepad.net> wrote:
> > On Wednesday 02 February 2005 14:27, peter.lidell at post.dk wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > I have installed 5.3 on a P4 with 1024mb.
> > > I am installing kde3 from source (ports). How long would you guys
> > > think that would take? It has been going on for almost 4 hours
> > > now... Should I stop it?
> > >
> > > Have never seen anything like it....8)
> > >
> > > Regards
> > >
> > > Peter
> >
> > I have an Athlon 3200 with 1024MB ram. It took about 28 hours for
> > me, but it spent many hours waiting for me to come back and answer
> > a question of some kind.
>
> On my Athlon 2400 with 1GB it usually takes 7-8 hours, but that's
> excluding a couple parts, and that's if I'm there to answer the
> questions or run batch. If I start it as batch right before I go to
> bed it's usually done by the time I get up. Can't remember offhand,
> but this time might not include qt, either.


> Damn, thats a long time! Why does it take this long from ports? When
> I did it from "sysinstall" it took about an hour...

Well, sysinstall off a CD is just installing a pre-compiled package. 
When the port is built and installed it's indistingishable from an 
installed package - what you're doing right now is compiling it 
locally, which is very cpu-intensive and does take some time for a 
program of any size, but this can have some advantages. FreeBSD's ports 
system is designed around this concept. If you want, you can use 
pkg_add -r (which will fetch remote packages) instead of compiling, or 
portinstall -P or portupgrade -P (or -PP), but you have to make sure 
you have the right dependencies. Since packages have to be built by 
someone after the port is updated, packages usually lag behind what's 
available in ports, but builds for KDE are available here and are 
updated regularly: http://rabarber.fruitsalad.org/  Most of the 
packages on the FreeBSD site itself are for RELEASEs, so that the 
packages on an install CD will work with the OS. Once you update the 
source to a higher patchlevel and rebuild your world and kernel so your 
RELEASE has all the security updates, you might have to rebuild those 
packages, too, but you might not - it depends on what was changed.

Another solution is to build locally, but do make package, which will 
create a package in addition to the installation, so you can use it to 
install elsewhere - this is useful for networks where one machine can 
act as the build machine for many computers. As long as the build 
options are consistent with the hardware (not using cpu optimization is 
more portable, but cpu optimization can help in some circumstances), 
and the dependencies are consistent, you can install that elsewhere or 
again on your own machine. You can also use one machine as the build 
machine and do make install through NFS, with /usr/ports mounted from 
the build machine, or you can make a network package repository.

There's more info here: 
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/08/07/FreeBSD_Basics.html

- jt