Comments on: APT-build — optimize your Debian!

By: falk

falk — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:25:49 +0000

“…set your environment variables before you run it!:

[…]

Otherwise your regular CFLAGS (and all of /etc/apt/apt-build.conf) will be ignored.”

Nope, what you see are the commands called by make. Apt-build uses a wrapper (apt-build-wrapper; probably in /usr/lib/apt-build/) wich adds the options from apt-build.conf. Read README.Debian (propably in /usr/share/doc/apt-build/).

The real gcc calls you’ll see after typing ‘ps ax | grep gcc’.

By: cww

cww — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:16:43 +0000

I had to put the following in my APT preferences file in order to make apt-get choose a package from the local repository over a package from the remote repository. Note that priorities over 1000 have a special meaning; see the apt_preferences man page.

Package: *
Pin: release o=apt-build
Pin-Priority: 1001

Awesome work. Thanks!

By: madman

madman — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 10:24:16 +0000

It’s true; without “–force-yes”, you will just get a reinstall of the same old binary package! Furthermore, all your optimizations are ignored anyway! It seems that apt-build is an old, half-baked attempt, and really is just a “novelty” item - unless you use something like this:

apt-build install –rebuild –reinstall –yes –force-yes

…set your environment variables before you run it!:

export CFLAGS_APPEND=”-O3 -march=pentium3 -fomit-frame-pointer”

export CXXFLAGS_APPEND=$CFLAGS_APPEND

Otherwise your regular CFLAGS (and all of /etc/apt/apt-build.conf) will be ignored. See the manpage for dpkg-buildsource for more info. BTW, the command-line options for apt-build behave slightly different that the documentation claims; hence –reinstall AND –rebuild together. With a little cleaning up, apt-build could be a great utility. If you want USE flags - USE=”gentoo” =)

By: Laurent

Laurent — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:47:39 +0000

And?
Can you quantify the improvement in term of speed?

I highly doubt it changes anything if you already have a libc6-686

By: Dann

Dann — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 07:32:39 +0000

I’ve had trouble with apt-build quitting on me before. This is only when it stumbles upon a package to install that does not exist in the repository (I’m at a loss as to why).
Just edit the apt-build.list file and erase everything up to and including the package that doesn’t work and continue on.

Cheers.

By: vook

vook — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 01:40:45 +0000

The term “Gentoo’s USE flags” implies that you believe that this is something that Gentoo has created and/or offers that other distributions and UNIX variants do not. Gentoo just tells you about them right away during the install. You can always completely customize the compilation process by creating a make.conf file in /etc - (linux didn’t invent this either btw - it’s been around a long time).

No, apt-build is not a novelty. It just doesn’t hold your hand the way Gentoo’s documentation does.

Nothing against Gentoo btw - it has gotten people excited about Linux in a way other distributions have not - and it has outstanding documentation. I just hope people realize that Gentoo doesn’t offer anything that wasn’t available before. If I really want the fastest and most optimized open OS around and I’m willing to tediously build it from scratch, I’ll pass on Gentoo and go straight for FreeBSD (or one of the others).

By: Catnap

Catnap — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 20:36:09 +0000

I tried apt-build a year or two ago. IIRC, “apt-build world” failed after a couple of hours of compiling. It might work better in the future because, AFAIK, Debian developers now do more automatic build testing than they used to in the past. (They don’t use apt-build to do this testing, though.

Nowadays I dual boot between the good old binary-Debian and a source-distro called Source Mage that is designed from the ground up to build all packages from source. The easy-to-use “sorcery” package manager in Source Mage is written in Bash and they try to avoid adding any patches or distro-specific configurations to packages, so Source Mage is refreshingly different from Debian. I love both of these distros.

By: bob f

bob f — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 12:22:28 +0000

I have used apt-build in the past, and if I remember correctly only the explicity named application was built. The dependencies binaries where downloaded/installed and the named package only was built. IMHO, Gentoo’s USE flags are what makes building from source make sense and without these, I found apt-build to be more of a novelty.