Re: Are we losing users to Gentoo?

[Patrice Fortier <Patrice.Fortier@u-bordeaux3.fr>]

Le mer 31/03/2004 à 22:01, Matthias Urlichs a écrit :
> Hi, Sean Harshbarger wrote:
> 
> > It would be nice to have support for optimized
> > binaries. IMHO it would help Debian out a lot.
> 
> As far as I recall, the performance gains from compiling everything with
> your-favorite-optimizer-settings aren't _that_ great -- typically smaller
> than what you'd gain by waiting a couple of months before buying your
> computer.

I do agree with you for most of the stuff we use on our computers.

But I'd like to point out that it could be interesting for a couple of
packages like libc and cypto libs (like libssl) to have a binary package
(with generic i686 support for example, as 686 is now at least 7 years
old).

libc contains math functions, and considering that the 386 didn't even
had an arithmetic coprocessor, we should get a significant speed up for
these functions. Plus every applications use it, so it would benefit
everyone of them.

We have something similar with crypto libs as they make an heavy use 
of maths/crypto functions which could greatly benefit from a generic
i686 binary package.

There are maybe a couple of other libs/applis which could be
interesting.

As you can see, this is quite lite for debian maintainers: only
2 (or so) packages, and only with new compile options compared
to the original package (i386).

If this first phase is proven to be successful, we can later think
about some desktop applications which are known be greatly improved
by this (gimp, mozilla come to mind).

Regards,
Patrice.