HI, I've been running slackware 9.1 on and off for the last two years and was wondering about something.

I've recently started to looking into making my own packages more and more instead of relying on other ppl's precompiled binaries and was wondering how exactly do you add optimizations to the packages?

Ok, for example this is what I've been doing.

./configure
make
checkinstall -S

Pretty basic... but from what I see in checkinstall these packages are only i386 optimized. I was just wondering how exactly do I optimize a package for i686 or for more personal use as athlon-xp?

I've used just about every possible distro (knoppix, arch, gentoo, redhat :P, mandrake :P, etc...) and in gentoo and Archlinux they use a make.conf file where you set global compile settings (sorry if thats not worded correctly, but work with me here)

Anyway again, my final question in a nutshell would be. How do you I make an optimized package from the simple ./configure type installation?

Any help would be great, even links to websites that explain this. Oh and sorry if this has been asked before, but I did a search and couldn't really find what I was looking for.

Thanks

You can export CCFLAGS with the desired optimisation-flags (ex: -fomit-frame-pointer -mcpu=athlon-xp) before you do the configure make (install) routine.

(edit: uhmm, that should be CFLAGS, ofcourse)

You can also look at the compilation messages. If you see -march=athlon, it means the ./configure script has detected your CPU and put the right compilation flags. Making a "simple" checkinstall can allow you to select the architecture of the package, this will just change the name of the package, but it could be use-full if you plan to release it or change your hardware and want to install your home made package without troubles.