Turing Uncomplete

Everyone who has used Arch knows that packages built from scratch use custom CFLAGS specified in /etc/makepkg.conf (or they do if they installed them with pacman/makepkg). This gives a great level of optimization control to you if you desire it, the default CFLAGS are generic i686 optimized, but the Arch wiki has a very good list of settings for different processors.

Now, this would appear to only give you optimization power over packages you compile yourself - which is true. However, what if you were to compile, say, all packages you have installed currently? That would optimize your whole system, akin to what Gentoo does. The only downside is that you would have to compile everything you wanted to install - at least, if you wanted to have a completely optimized system.

Until now, there has been no easy way to do this. There has been the make world command, which compiles an entire repository for you, but people generally just want to compile their packages, not all packages. Cimi on the Arch Linux Forums has created a script to do this for you. I’m not sure what the improvement for me would be, as I haven’t recompiled everything yet, but I am planning to do so over the summer - as well as compile a custom kernel. I’m waiting until the summer to give the script a chance to mature and have more things - such as update handling - built in and improved.

Here is a screenshot of the script, displaying the help screen.

This really gives me little reason to try both Gentoo and Linux From Scratch. I was going to try Gentoo to see the speed difference, but there would be no difference if my computer is already optimized! I’ll still be trying LFS at some point, as that will be a great learning experience.