Re: lang/rust is super slow to build

On Tue, Dec 13, 2022, at 2:18 PM, Xin LI wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 13, 2022 at 7:55 AM Mel Pilgrim <list_freebsd@bluerosetech.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On 2022-12-12 11:27, Pat Maddox wrote:
>> > Using poudriere, lang/rust is at 2 hours and counting on my 10-core i9
>> > w/ 128 gigs of RAM.
>> >
>> > Does that sound right? It seems extremely slow to me, but this is my
>> > first time building it.
>>
>> That sounds typical.  You can use ccache and tmpfs to speed it up a
>> little bit, but both rust and llvm are computationally massive.
>>
>> Even worse, poudriere doesn't need to build it.  If you aren't changing
>> its options there's no functional difference between building it locally
>> and installing from the public pkg repo.  Poudriere does have the
>> ability to install from pkgs, but there is a 2-year-old bug that
>> prevents that feature from working correctly.
>>
>> I recommend everyone comment on issue #822 on the freebsd/poudriere
>> github[1] and explain how much of a pain it is that poudriere doesn't
>> have sane behaviour wrt dependencies.  Maybe if enough people comment it
>> will spur a fix.
>>
>> 1: https://github.com/freebsd/poudriere/issues/822
>
>
> IMHO the ports collection should provide and use prebuilt packages of
> compilers (LLVM, GCC, Rust, etc.) built from the FreeBSD packages builder,
> and ports framework (possibly also the base system) should be changed to
> use prebuilt packages by default, unless a) user requested to build
> everything from source, or b) no binary package is available for the
> platform combination, like a Tier-2 platform.  The source ports for
> compilers should have all optimizations (like PGO, LTO, etc.) enabled by
> default, and require reasonably modern (perhaps newer than Sandy Bridge)
> processor features by default.
>
> It does not make sense for most users to build compilers from source all
> the time, because most of them don't make any changes that would affect the
> toolchain, which takes hours for them to build, even with beefy machines
> and with parallelism and caching enabled.  For these users, it's just a
> waste of time and also increases their carbon footprint for nothing good.
>
> Cheers,

Perhaps poudriere needs (or even already has?) a more fine-grained way to declare whether to fetch package dependencies. -b works - but will do that for every dependency, whereas I may only want it to fetch llvm and other expensive ports.

The value to me in building from ports is that I know the state of my packages matches my ports tree. I’m not installing a package that was built a week ago.

For expensive ports though, I’ll take the trade off of saving time in exchange for a bit of staleness.

btw vanilla ports does have a mechanism for installing package dependencies, it’s `make install-missing-packages`.

Pat