Stuart Herbert

I recently splashed out on a nice dual-xeon box. With 2 x 2.8 GHz 533MHz FSB cpus and onboard SCSI, it\’s really made it much easier to investigate and fix bugs in packages.

When I first built up the box, though, the main surprise was just how long it took to put Gentoo onto the machine. This thing is a compile-beast, it really is. But, partly because a lot of packages cannot safely be compiled in parallel, this machine spent a lot of the time running at far less than 100%. Boy was that dissappointing!

With a compile-beast box like this though, you quickly notice just how much of a bottleneck GNU\’s autoconf scripts are. I have a few ideas on what could be done to reduce this bottleneck, and I have some code that looks promising. It\’ll be a week or two before it\’s fit for public consumption.

After something like eight years together (neither of us have kept an accurate count), Kristi and I are getting married later this year. It\’ll be a civil ceremony, followed by a quick escape out into our beloved Welsh mountains for a few days hiking.

Thanks to my nice new shiny toy (more on that shortly), I\’ve been able to get CLI and Apache 1/2 mod PHP 5 into Portage. The CLI stuff works great – partly because I\’m using it daily atm. With the mod_php5 package, all I\’ve done so far is proved that phpinfo() works as expected.

Neither package handles dependencies properly yet, simply because it takes a long time to work through the best part of 100 different configuration options supported by PHP 5\’s configure script. But we\’ll get there.

Best regards,
Stu