On Sun, Jul 10, 2005 at 03:38:29PM -0400, Nick Holland wrote: > > If your machine is too slow to do what you need it to do, you need a > faster machine. Cross compiling is not the answer to your problem. >
Not so Nick. There may be some cases where you deliberately have a slow machine for reasons of power consumption/heat disappation, perhaps a fanless machine, you want to update. Or just that the fastest machine in the architecture you are targeting falls way behind current machines (SPARC vs current P4, say). Telling someone to use a faster machine is a trite answer but, in some cases, it is simply infeasible. > Which would you rather have developers doing...adding new > features, cleaning up code, improving existing operation...or helping > <insert adjective here> users do silly things with no value added to the > project? > "improving existing operation" you just said it there. Cross building means that you are not bound by the limitations of the target hardware. This actually impacts the developers more than anyone else, especially during the release cycle. Imagine having to restart a build that takes literally days to complete because what seemed to be a benign change that fixes a bug causes an architecture specific build error. In a cross build environment the impact could be as little as a hour or two instead of days. It means developers can do more stuff because they are not waiting for the slower processors to grind through a compile. -- Brett Lymn
