Gnome success report, optimized compiling

["Richard Hult" <rhult hem2 passagen se>]

I have been a bit concerned over the fact that gnome has been kind of huge
and slow and sucking every piece of perfomance out of my P166. So, last
night I decided to compile everything myself instead of using the RPMS.

My knowledge of the different optimization flags for the compiler isn't the
best, so I took some of the flags found on mandrake's page (hope that's fine
with you mandrake ;) and ended up with the following:

-O6 -finline-functions -fkeep-inline-functions -funroll-loops -mpentium -mcp
u=pentium -march=pentium -malign-loops=2 -malign-jumps=2 -malign-functions=2

I kind of kept the things that sounded familiar from my 'modern compiler
implementation' course last semester ;)

I also used egcs instead of gcc. I started with glib and gtk+ and continued
with the rest. Everything went fine, except when compiling gtk-xmhtml in the
gnome-libs package. Something went wrong and make exited with an error
message for the file frame.po (right after trying to compile frame.c).

Since there was no real error message, it just said something like "ERROR",
and exited, I suspected that it had to do with the optimizations, so I
manually edited CFLAGS in the Makefile for gtk-xmhtml to -O2, and everything
worked fine.

When everthing was done, I started the panel up. Wow!!! It's f-a-s-t!! It's
mean and lean and quick :) My worries went away finally :) And the memory
footprint went donw rather drastically too, from huge to little.

So now that I know what's waiting for Gnome 1.0, I'll turn debugging back on
:)

Thanks for a great piece of work!!
Richard