Started rebuilding my system.
In my post yesterday I mentioned a script that would recompile all installed packages on an Arch system, with customized CFLAGS and so on. I was going to wait until the summer to do this, but I really couldn’t resist trying it now.
Recompiling all AUR packages worked perfectly well - how could it not? AUR packages are guaranteed to compile because they are not distributed in binary form. It didn’t take very long to compile these, as I didn’t have very many installed.
Recompiling all community and unstable packages however, did not work so well. It seems that quite a few package maintainers didn’t bother to update their PKGBUILDs as the packages changed. This resulted in a few packages not being able to compile, I am keeping a list of these packages, and will probably notify the package maintainers that their PKGBUILD is out of date.
I haven’t yet noticed a difference, if there is a speed increase I haven’t been able to notice it as of yet. I am planning on recompiling the rest of my system over the next week as it is half term, and it will give me incentive to actually do some revision. Since I am in a compiling mood, I may also attempt compiling a custom kernel tomorrow, that is, if I’m not compiling other things all day.
It will be interesting to see if I can notice the speed difference between a generic i686 optimized system and one specifically optimized for my Athlon XP.
