GCC compilation: 48 hours (not out)
 

The Linux from Scratch is a good idea; I thought I would give it a try on a lap-top. Acer, seven years old, 233 Mhz, 4 Gb hard drive, 32 Mb memory. I made an 80 Mb swap partition, downloaded the live CD, and got started.

Very impressed by the ability of the live CD to correctly detect the PCMCIA slot with its ethernet card, and the Neomagic screen. The last time I tried Linux (several different distributions a year or so ago) it could not do that.

So I proceeded with the compilations in chapter 5. Binutils - yes, it took several hours, but all went well. Very educational and encouraging. Then GCC - off it goes. Ten minutes later it is still compiling. Well, let it go on, out of curiosity. But forty-eight hours later it is still compiling!

Now in my long (forty-five year) experience with computers, no compilation of anything should take longer than ten minutes. There is something badly wrong if it takes longer than that on a machine like that.

And this is precisely the sort of experience which puts people off Linux. (I know it is possible to install GCC binaries quickly without recompiling it , but that is not really the point.)

To the newcomer there is often the appearance of deliberate obfuscation about many aspects of Linux, and this was exemplified by a) the unnecessary messages which flashed by for forty-eight hours, b) their inscrutability, and c) the unnecessary size and complexity of this compiler and the way it is built.

How about a GCC expert or two sitting down to revise this package so that it builds in ten minutes, eh? Please don't say it is impossible. In the meantime I find Linux from Scratch a good idea but wholly impractical in my surely not untypical case.

You have got to be kidding me.

This is the entire reason people use binaries. GCC is an incredibly useful (and complex) piece of code. There is absolutely no way it is ever going to compile in ten minutes.

Believe me, there are tons of programs and packages for Linux, Windows, Mac OS, etc. that take WAY longer then 10 minutes to compile and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Hi,

The first time I installed LFS it was on an pentium 233 with 64 Mb ram and 2 small (8 + 32 Gb) disks. Compiling of some packets took a long time, some (gcc for example) I let run overnight (it took 10 hours or so, if memory serves me right).

I do agree that 48+ hours seems too long. On the other hand you don't 'just' compile gcc, you are probably at the make bootstrap part (you don't mention this) which compiles gcc several times. But you should already know that with all the experience you have ;)

For more information on what is actually happening when you build GCC see the GCC Install Documentation from GNU.

I'm also going to go ahead and prepare you... if you build KDE, Gnome, or a Linux Kernel on that box it is probably going to take longer then 10 minutes... Kernel will probably be about 25, Gnome or KDE could take 8 hours depending on how much of it you install.