Re: [gentoo-user] Prebuilt packages

[Eli Schwartz <eschwartz@gentoo.org>]

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On 2/11/25 6:04 PM, Mickaël Bucas wrote:
> I think Firefox is currently a special case, because there's also
> www-client/firefox-bin which obviously is precompiled.
> So prebuilt packages probably aren't built for www-client/firefox
> 
> There're a few like this, compiled by Gentoo :
> app-office/libreoffice-bin
> dev-lang/rust-bin
> mail-client/thunderbird-bin
> 
> I found about 200 packages ending with "-bin", I didn't check further
> if non-bin packages are available and then if prebuilt packages for
> them exist, but it seems logical to me to not compile twice.
> However if you want the binary version, you have to switch manually,
> because emerge sees them as different packages.


As you noted downthread, both exist.

The ebuild names with "-bin" in them long predate the gentoo binhost
project. In the case of firefox, those are direct prebuilt binaries
compiled and hosted by Mozilla. In the case of rust, some of those are
the Rust project's prebuilt binaries (the same ones downloaded by rustup
into $HOME) and for architectures that the Rust project doesn't cover,
Arthur builds a standalone rust and uploads it.

libreoffice-bin is entirely gentoo-built for the original purpose of
being a stopgap measure instead of a binhost. It may eventually go away.
The others are arguably useful inasmuch as users may want to test the
official Mozilla etc production binaries.


-- 
Eli Schwartz

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