Re: [Sheflug] Help with xorg and gentoo

["Wonkey Donkey" <wonkey_donkey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Humphrey" <prh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <sheflug@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, January 14, 2007 4:35 PM
Subject: Re: [Sheflug] Help with xorg and gentoo


> On Wednesday 06 December 2006 12:11, Wonkey Donkey wrote:
>
>> GENTOO_MIRRORS is based on my own ISP and is very fast indeed.
>
> Yes, I use the same one.
>
>> ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86". I have sometimes switched between the two on this
>> (~x86 and x86), but never on the same system. Things break otherwise.
>> ~x86 is my own preference as a rule.
>
> ~amd64 in my case; never a problem with it here. Someone even suggested 
> once
> that ~amd64 is more stable than amd64, but that's just silly.
>
>> MAKEOPTS="-j2", as per the official Gentoo guides, number of physical
>> processors + 1.
>
> I found -j5 to work better than -j3 with my dual CPUs; maybe -j4 would do
> just as well, but it does seem I need a spare job in each processor's 
> queue
> all the time.
>
>> LINGUAS="en" is something I added more recently. I have seen varying
>> reports of using this one; in some packages en actually means English. In
>> others en means English-US, and en_GB means British. en seems to work ok
>> at the moment though, and all keys are where they should be.
>
> I didn't think keys had anything to do with LINGUAS; have I missed
> something? I have LINGUAS="en_GB", which seems to work.
>
>> Now to the use flags.
>
> The way I tackle those is to look at emerge --info output for things I 
> want
> but aren't there, and vice versa, then add them to make.conf. Also 
> anything
> that's suggested at the end of an ebuild is grist to the mill, as well as
> things I can see for myself that I'll need, such as alsa and cups.
> Otherwise I prefer to let the flags be set in the profiles, where they're
> updated as needed upstream. The more options I set, the more maintenance
> work I get.
>
>> The recent problems with circular dependencies that have been reported in
>> the Gentoo forums all suggest adding or removing different flags too,
>> which doesnt really help a lot.
>
> I haven't seen any circularities here - are they just on x86? (I also
> haven't read the Gentoo forums yet since coming back on line.)
>
<snip>

Well with a couple of changes, I got the make.conf working reasonably well 
overall. I also reduced the make flags by doing an 'emerge --info' without 
any make flags set, thereby revealing what the system would build. I then 
removed those flags from my own list (quite a few duplicates existed). With 
the remaining ones, I went through the flags list, and instead of picking 
everything I thought I *might* need, I picked only the ones that I 100% 
understood and knew I needed. I have changed LINGUAS to en_GB, as most 
packages that mention language flags seem to have en_GB in them; fewer of 
them have en.

There was a period of quite disruptive circular references happening, 
possibly due to the modular kde, and one or two other problematic packages. 
Having 3 different methods of getting kde up and running, and the ability to 
switch between them has caused more trouble than its worth in my opinion. If 
memory serves me right, they are kde, kde-meta, and something else that 
gives you the absolute minimal build to run it.

Merging gnome seems to have settled down a bit too. The problems with that 
were more related to circular dependencies outside of the gnome packages 
themselves, but were pulled in overall.

And I found a couple of dinky little flags too, such as 'logitech-mice' to 
include specific stuff for my mouse, 'mozbranding' to get a normal looking 
firefox, and one or two others. Mostly eye-candy stuff, but all helpful 
towards the finished build.

There have been periods like this before for Gentoo, where stuff seemed to 
go belly-up for ages and then settle down again. I just hope it doesn't 
repeat itself again any time soon.

Steve. 



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