From my point of view, this is a bug report. From your point of view, you may think this is an enhancement request (see my suggestion below). I've tried to emerge sys-devel/gcc-4.1.1, but it fails when it fills up my disk partition. I've only got 900 megabytes of space available, and this isn't enough. (Yes, I have already deleted every unnecessary file on the partition I use for PORTAGE_TMPDIR. No, I do not have a better partition to use for this. Maybe I will buy a new computer soon and have a bigger disk; perhaps someone will donate money for this?) Note that the amount of space I have is enough for every other one of the over 500 packages I have installed. It was even enough to build the old monolithic X package back before it got split up. It is far more than needed for sys-devel/gcc-3.4.6-r1, which I am currently using. Normally, I have my CFLAGS set to include debugging info (via "-ggdb"), but I have turned this off for sys-devel/gcc in my /etc/bashrc file to try to save space while compiling. This was not enough as it still runs out of space. (I notice anyway that the Makefiles turn on "-g" anyway for some of the files.) I will soon be trying to emerge sys-devel/gcc-4.1.1 again with "-Os" instead of "-O2" in my CFLAGS. However, even if this succeeds, it will not really be satisfactory. First, it would be much better if gcc did not use nearly all space available when compiling. Second, gcc is used so often on my machine that it should be optimized for speed as much as possible. I thought maybe some improvement could be made by reducing the number of duplicate files in the build area. Unfortunately, it looks like at most a 4% savings in the size can be made this way. I checked with a Perl script the size of space wasted by duplicate files in the build area, and the amount of wasted space comes to less than 32 megabytes. (This is only the amount wasted before the ebuild fails due to a full disk.) One possible solution would be to have a sys-devel/gcc-bin package with precompiled binaries. Because gcc now takes so much space to compile, maybe it needs to be treated the same way as big applications like OpenOffice or Mozilla that have precompiled "bin" packages available in Portage. Suggestions? Comments? Help? Attaching my "emerge --info" output separately as the system complains my message is too long with it included here. Ignore the CFLAGS setting in it; as I indicate above I override this for gcc in /etc/bashrc.
Created attachment 87867 [details] My "emerge --info" output. See initial comment for info about CFLAGS.
> Suggestions? Comments? Help? LOL. Buy a better hard drive, they are cheap.
(In reply to comment #0) I want to donate you! Do you have a paypal account?
(In reply to comment #2) > > Suggestions? Comments? Help? > > LOL. Buy a better hard drive, they are cheap. Dear Jakub, Can you please explain to me why Mozilla Firefox deserves a "-bin" package, when it takes much less space to build than the latest version of GCC? I think "CANTFIX" is a seriously unhelpful resolution. Why is it not possible to fix this? What is wrong with my suggestion? Joe
