What are the packages you HATE to emerge and WHY ?

dextermagnific · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Apr 2005 Posts: 107

Hi all,

I'm using gentoo for 5 years now and like it a lot. However when it comes to emerge (install/upgrade) some packages, I'm not very happy and whish there exists "binary" versions that install immediately.

So I wonder if some of you also hate emerging some packages and why ?

Let's start with me

Hate : Qt, Why : takes toooooooo long to compile

mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3140

Baselayout! Updates to the baselayout are less frequent these days, but always require a lot of work with etc-update afterword.

patrikas · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 28 Nov 2009 Posts: 106

Updating gcc, libc.. Overheats my Turion if compiling without power saving CPU frequency policy and always reboots unwantedly.. If seriously building Gnome, Kde takes too much time.

seqizz · Posted: Tue Dec 01, 2009 10:01 pm Post subject: :\

gstreamer, i don't know why.. Maybe just i don't like its name.. But i hate to emerge gstreamer.. :mrgreen:

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platojones · Posted: Tue Dec 01, 2009 10:52 pm Post subject:

I love emerging them all

But I have a fast machine.

StringCheesian · l33t Joined: 21 Oct 2003 Posts: 886

openoffice

It launches much faster than openoffice-bin and it's menus don't look like wine, but I'm not sure its worth it. It takes over 2 hours. And because it needs about 5 gigs of temporary space to build, I can't mount tmpfs on /var/tmp/portage, which means more harddisk wear and more filesystem fragmentation.

Upgrading KDE makes me seriously consider Arch Linux.

I wish there was a distro where I can choose for any package between customizing USE flags and waiting for it to compile, or accepting one-size-fits-all USE flags and downloading a binary to install. I know portage supports BINHOSTs, but no BINHOST is that extensive or trustworthy, right?

djdunn · Posted: Wed Dec 02, 2009 12:20 am Post subject:

uh i hate stuff that takes more than 4 gigs to emerge cause it gets dumped into swap and my videogames slow way way down.

normally i can game while i compile.
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x22 · Apprentice Joined: 24 Apr 2006 Posts: 206

- any package which fails to emerge
- baselayout = danger of breakage
- openoffice = takes long time and uses great amount of disk space
- KDE = takes long time
- anything with many new USE flags

darklegion · Guru Joined: 14 Nov 2004 Posts: 415

ToeiRei · Veteran Joined: 03 Jan 2005 Posts: 1090 Location: Austria

binary packages are the ones I hate most because of you just have to take them the way they are.

If there are sources available, you decide on how they are compiled. You choose the USE Flags, you do. And you can fix things as you don't rely on the packages and their shipped binaries to keep dependencies satisfied.
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genstorm · Veteran Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 1840 Location: Austria

Jaglover · Posted: Wed Dec 02, 2009 1:10 pm Post subject:

I'm in the same boat ... in actuality I switched to the OpenBox because xfce4-mixer pulls in gstreamer. :evil:

durian · Guru Joined: 16 Jul 2003 Posts: 312 Location: Margretetorp

I used to care about the big ones, Firefox, gcc, KDE stuff.

But now I have a core i7 the bottleneck is downloading the source 8)

-peter

tkhemili78 · n00b Joined: 31 Jul 2007 Posts: 37 Location: Eastern US

KDE, regardless of which version, I usually set to emerge overnight. That can be a real PITA if it hit an error during, then fix the error, and resume the emerge.... and wait. I once emerge Openoffice from the source. and that took a few hours. glibc would be a close third.

i92guboj · Posted: Wed Dec 02, 2009 5:21 pm Post subject:

Webkit. Actually the situation is a nonsense. I have no idea why do I have to emerge 3 versions of webkit. One for chromium, one for qt, one for gtk. It's stupid, and it takes a few hours to emerge each one of them in a Sempron. It seems that someone is really eager to repeat yet again the same errors that mozilla have had in the past. Oh well, it's their time...
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John R. Graham · Posted: Wed Dec 02, 2009 6:25 pm Post subject:

I think these binary distros are on to something. Think of all the compile time we'd be saving if we switched.

- John
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i92guboj · Posted: Wed Dec 02, 2009 6:31 pm Post subject:

I am not talking about compile times. I think that by now I already know what Gentoo is about

I talk about compiling the same thrice thanks to a bad design architecture. Code sharing? someone? Imagine you had to compile one version of qt for each qt program you use. That's what you get with webkit currently: one version of webkit for each toolkit you want to use, and an extra one for this silly google browser.
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John R. Graham · Posted: Wed Dec 02, 2009 6:39 pm Post subject:

Yeah, I understand. I wasn't commenting on your post but rather the, "If only I could get hamburgers at the ice cream shop," feel of the topic in general.

- John
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d2_racing · Posted: Thu Dec 03, 2009 3:31 am Post subject:

Me my concern, GCC because I always run this :

ssuominen · Posted: Thu Dec 03, 2009 10:32 am Post subject:

regomodo · Guru Joined: 25 Mar 2008 Posts: 444

Openoffice (given up compiling that), xulrunner, and qt-webkit.

Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1427

Two main things:

1) Anything that pulls in dependencies for stuff I don't want/use; I have an increasing number of these in my overlay where I've manually hacked them to remove such dependencies (Or optionalize them with USE flags, as they should have been!).

2) Anything that wrecks havok with the whole system; Sometimes it's unavoidable, and we've had several of these relatively recently. Either deep libs (libjpeg, expat etc.) with many dependencies which promptly get broken, or big things like major changes to X and KDE that require you to throw out your environment and spend hours researching and reconfiguring/remaking it.

i92guboj · Posted: Thu Dec 03, 2009 6:58 pm Post subject:

mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3140

i92guboj · Posted: Thu Dec 03, 2009 7:25 pm Post subject: