On Tuesday 22 November 2005 16:14, Chris Gianelloni wrote: > Give me one example of something that you can do with a stage1 or stage2 > tarball that you cannot with a stage3 tarball.
It's useful if you have to change compiler or other tool-chain part right from the start (e.g. use 3.4.* on i386, where 3.3.* is default) on PentiumM in order to use -march=pentium-m. It's certainly possible to start with stage 3, but makes total process last longer (Much more to recompile) and is more error-prone. Example of this risk: When installing GCC3.4 one may forget to install old libstdc++ (it has to be unmasked, and depending on use-flags it me not yes be reauested by portage!) and have a missing linking dependency on libstdc++ in python (no more portage to recompile python!) once GCC3.3 is unmerged. For some server-setups it may also be useful to start from a very minimal base in order to avoid hidden dependencies caused by unconditionnal operations of configure which add unwanted dependencies (e.g. USE-flags disables dep, but configure script still uses it, be it directly or indirectly) Sure you can depclean afterwards to removed unneeded packages, but as a precaution a "emerge -e world" would need to be done (loss of time). It's fine to make stage1/stage2 non-recommended as they bring no advantage over stage3 for most desktop systems, but should stay available and documented for "minority" who has valid use of it. Bruno -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
