The Age of the Universe (was: Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo 2006.1)

[Danny van Dyk <kugelfang@gentoo.org>]

Am Samstag, 2. September 2006 13:18 schrieb Edgar Hucek:
> >> 2.) Enable the use flage accessibility gnome cant be
> >> merged. It fails on compile the speech-tools.
> >> It seams that USE flags are not realy tested or how
> >> can it happen that there are already know bugs in the
> >> stable distro ?
> >>
> >> http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=116030
> >>
> >> Festival and the speech-tools are well know not to
> >> compile with gcc >=4.
> >
> > Well, you know - if you go to read the speech-tools/festival & co.
> > bug, and read the ebuild, you'll see that the whole thing and code
> > is one huge mess, that doesn't compile even w/ gcc-3.3 without
> > patching. You'd probably prefer to never put out a new release, I
> > guess? How many people are using this one, and how does it justify
> > delaying the release even more?
>
> From my point of view, should it be garanted that a package and
> depencies compiles when all use flags are enabled. If a depency can't
> be compiled the use flag and depence should be dissabled/removed from
> a package.
Please _think_ before you make such a demand. Just a small investigation 
would show this:

dev-lang/php-5.1.4-r6 has _96_ USE flags. That makes 2^96 = 7.9928+28 
combinations. Given the (unreasonable) assumption that each compilation 
would only take 1s and each compilation would actually succeed, you'd 
still have ~8e28 seconds. The age of the universe is approximately 4e17 
seconds.

This hasn't yet investigated allt he possible combinations of packages 
depending on dev-lang/php, or the ~10,000 other packages in the tree.

Danny
-- 
Danny van Dyk <kugelfang@gentoo.org>
Gentoo/AMD64 Project, Gentoo Scientific Project
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