Re: debian i586?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "B0Ti" == B0Ti  <9915104t@example.com> writes:

    B0Ti> Actually in the early days, when Mandrake was basically just
    B0Ti> an i586 port of RedHat linux and not much more, this is what
    B0Ti> has made it a popular distro IMHO.

    B0Ti> Now that it has all the shiny point&click config tools no
    B0Ti> wonder so many newbies started using it.

The problems aren't newbie problems, unfortunately; they're out and
out bugs, typically fixing what ain't broke.

    B0Ti> But I'm still using it too, think whatever you want ;-P

I think you like shiny point & click stuff, that's all.  That's all
that excessive optimization is.

Nothing wrong with liking shiny and/or transparent stuff.

But you asked why Debian doesn't provide it.  Debian has enough bugs
of its own, without making an extra effort to break working code the
way Mandrake does.  ;-)

    >> Why not recompile only your compute-bound apps, and use the
    >> time saved to study up on what optimization is, and what it can
    >> and can't do?

    B0Ti> I thought about it. But if I consider to compile just glibc
    B0Ti> , XFree, kernel, and a few other packages, that still would
    B0Ti> keep me and my box busy for a day.

It may keep your box busy for a day, but unless you have to do massive
rearrangement of your disk space to make space for a couple gigs of
source and generated files, it will take you half an hour to figure
out how to get the optimizations you want for glibc and start the
package build, 10 minutes for the kernel, and then 5 minutes per
package thereafter.

This is Debian you're talking about; you just do

for p in $PACKAGES; do apt-get source $p; done

and go to breakfast; no time for the download and source setup.  After
the download is done, you do the glibc build etc.  Shouldn't take much
of your time, and thereafter you'll be able to do it in your sleep.
The only hassle might be XFree86; but I assume it respects the CFLAGS
environment variable somehow.

    B0Ti> And it's just not worth the hassle, for me that is.

I see....  :-(

    B0Ti> Anyway, does it hurt to have the whole distro optimized for
    B0Ti> the processor i use?

Yes, unless you do it yourself.  But Oliver already explained why
better than I can, so you should go reread his post.

-- 
University of Tsukuba                Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences       Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
_________________  _________________  _________________  _________________
What are those straight lines for?  "XEmacs rules."