Re: error in 0.12.1 garnome

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Andreas Somogyi">

> > Did you change any GARNOME settings, or build it "differently" in any
> > way (such as using -j or GCC 3.1, or...)?
> 
> For a newbie: What difference does the '-j' setting make?

-j is a parameter to make which tells it to fulfill dependencies in
parallel.

Say a particular file needed three files compiled before it: With 'make',
those files would be built one after the other. With 'make -j2', two of
those files would be built at the same time. With 'make -j', all three would
be built at the same time.

(-j becomes interesting when you have, say, sixteen files to build at once.
It's a great way of testing your CPU, memory and I/O in one fell swoop.)

> I've used linux for about a year, but am no programmer, so these things
> still confuse me... And should there be any differences between compiling
> with gcc-2.95, gcc-3.0 and 3.1?

2.95 is the most commonly used at this point, 3.0 is generally regarded as
broken, 3.1 is the "new stable" release, and supports lots of crazy new
optimisations for things like athlon-xp arch, etc. I just used 3.1 to see if
it would work. ;-)

> I've seen the options for Athlon and Intel in gar.conf.mk, but should I really 
> use gcc-2.95 for Intel and 3.0 for Athlon or is faster to compile with 3.0 or 
> 3.1 for both?

Faster with 3.1 for both, but I don't know the best crazy optimisations for
Intel, so I left them as they were. If anyone has good ones that I should
add, send them in.

> Btw - Gnome compiled from 0.12.2 seems to load _a lot_ slower than 0.12.0... 

Given that there are *very* few differences in the software, I find that
surprising. You may be building it differently, I don't know. If you want to
see it running speedily, use the non-debugging settings in category.mk. But
don't submit backtraces with non-debug builds!

- Jeff

-- 
   "The ability to procrastinate is what separates us from the machines."   
                     - Chris Gregory, Desktop Magazine