“But computing power is much higher now. The same compilation now would probably take 1-2 hours, max. Updates would be super fast.”
I’m not so sure. A lot of the power comes from multiple cores. Years ago I had one core, now I have eight. A lot of the compiles don’t use all the cores.
Software has also gotten bigger. rustc is huge, for example. It didn’t even exist when I used Gentoo years ago.
These days I’m on the Mac and I just switched to Homebrew after using Macports for years. It was for one of the same reasons I stopped using Gentoo: compiling takes too long. Whenever I upgraded Mac OS versions, Macports required me to recompile everything. This was no problem at all for, say, tree. But something was pulling in gcc (emacs needed it for some reason??) and this took ages to compile.
At least Macports worked though. When I used Gentoo, it took so long to compile things that I would leave it overnight, and of course often in the morning I would see that the compilation stopped halfway through because something was broken. Hopefully that’s improved. Or of course maybe the binary packages will help with this.
But if I wanted a build-your-own, rolling-release binary system, I don’t see why I wouldn’t just use Arch.
I’m not so sure. A lot of the power comes from multiple cores. Years ago I had one core, now I have eight. A lot of the compiles don’t use all the cores.
Software has also gotten bigger. rustc is huge, for example. It didn’t even exist when I used Gentoo years ago.
These days I’m on the Mac and I just switched to Homebrew after using Macports for years. It was for one of the same reasons I stopped using Gentoo: compiling takes too long. Whenever I upgraded Mac OS versions, Macports required me to recompile everything. This was no problem at all for, say, tree. But something was pulling in gcc (emacs needed it for some reason??) and this took ages to compile.
At least Macports worked though. When I used Gentoo, it took so long to compile things that I would leave it overnight, and of course often in the morning I would see that the compilation stopped halfway through because something was broken. Hopefully that’s improved. Or of course maybe the binary packages will help with this.
But if I wanted a build-your-own, rolling-release binary system, I don’t see why I wouldn’t just use Arch.