CPU specific/optimized Debian builds ?

[Renaud Guerin <rguerin@free.fr>]

Hi,

I was having a look at Gentoo Linux the other night, and their principle of 
rebuilding your own packages with your chosen gcc -O & -march flags.

I got wondering, how one should go about rebuilding from source a whole 
debian installation in a similar way ?
Anybody did this before, or are there any significant hurdles that prevent 
automating this process ?

With the forthcoming significant updates to big parts of the system (XF4.2, 
KDE 3), and the simultaneous release of gcc 3.1, maybe now would also be a 
good time to consider having an arch-"x86 on steroids" along with i386, with 
an automated build process.

I've read the performance improvements in the case of Gentoo *really* make a 
difference.
I believe Debian has an advanced enough packages & build system to make such 
build processes relatively painless, so why not take advantage of it and 
offer more performance ?

I could understand the overhead and practical unfeasability of adding an 
additional arch (even though it's not really a *different* arch), but it'd be 
nice if at least there were a straightforward tool/procedure to generate a 
custom-built CD Image with optimized packages.

I suspect there might be something like this already, maybe someone is even 
already hosting optimized ISO's somewhere.
If so, please make yourself heard ! :)

ps: please cc me answers.


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