Comment by plant-ian
3 days ago
Compiling Chromium took absolutely forever 5+ years ago. I think a whole system took like 20% of the time that Chromium would take to compile. I can't even imagine with rust extensions added on top now. Gentoo was so awesome though but I had to switch to debian because I would just play with my configuration all the time and break things. One day I hope to return to using it though or setup another machine to use it.
So basically they'd be new CVE's appearing by the time someone built the previous release at this pace? :P
The kernel itself used to take just as long.
I could build the kernel on a pentium 3 in about 20 minutes.
When you build your own kernel you don't compile all the random crap like token ring support and 30 filesystems nobody uses.
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I was ok with Chromium alone taking ~6h. I moved away when I started experimenting with Rust.
No ccache?
Chromium is a pyramid of components and the higher you go up, the longer the compilation of single file takes, because they depend on so many things. This makes caching difficult. A small change at the bottom can invalidate many files, especially the heavy ones at the top. The build system ninja already does caching, but it only offers limited benefits. Then there is so much activity that if you plan to do a weekly build, you can do it from scratch.
ccache for portage is broken since at least 2010. Because each package source gets extracted and compiled in it's own versioned directory, with each new version the cache is invalidated by the different path.
https://bugs.gentoo.org/346063
ccache is not very effective accross different versions of software as it only takes one small change in a header that's included everywhere to make the cache completely useless.