Re: Help requested: Packages which FTBFS randomly
On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 01:57:52AM +0100, Adam Borowski wrote:
> * single-CPU machines have gone the way of the dodo. Even the crummiest
> machine I could find while dumpster-diving looking for a non-sse3 one
> already has HT and builds your examples successfully. Same for ARM SoCs
> -- my RPi1 is kaputt, and anything newer has multiple cores. This, I'd
> say it's a waste of time to care about _building_ on single CPU.
Sure, single-CPU machines are extremely difficult to find these days,
but *only* as physical machines.
If you were to make a derived distro, let's say, using different build
flags, and wanted to build all packages, you would probably not buy a
new computer for that, you would rent virtual machines instead.
And those are single-CPU if they are small enough. Building on
multi-core is anti-economic, because a multi-core machine usually
cost twice or four times the price of a single-CPU machine.
"But they take half or a quarter of the time", you will say. Well,
maybe, or maybe not. Some packages benefit from parallelism and some
do not. I've checked that 97% of all packages in stretch may be built
with only 1 GB of RAM. Using a bigger machine is usually a waste of resources.
So yes, single-CPU machines are still very common these days, except
that they are not whole computers anymore, and lots of people use them
every day. Considering them to be unupported "because all physycal
machines are multi-core these days" would be quite silly.
Thanks.
Reply to: