RE: Advice requested: how big can we be?

[Paul Koning <pkoning at equallogic dot com>]

>>>>> "S" == S Bosscher <S.Bosscher@student.tudelft.nl> writes:

 >> The current libgcj build requires a process size > 256M bytes.

 S> Actually, its more than 370MB for mainline -- I had a look at this
 S> yesterday and I was shocked.  Why is it so big???

 >> Is this unreasonable?  Should we be able to build on boxes with
 >> less swap than that?  Or shall we just say "512M swap or don't
 >> bother building libgcj" ?

 S> Please no! It's bad enough as it is.

 S> There still are people who try to make their contribution to GCC
 S> but who don't have the latest and greatest from the hardware
 S> stores.

 S> I have an Athlon XP2000 with 265MB and 512MB swap, and I like to
 S> think this is a decent machine.  Certainly that should be enough
 S> to build GCC without trouble.  But building libjava more than
 S> doubles my bootstrap time and my computer is swapping like mad
 S> when it's building the lib (making it impossible to bootstrap in
 S> the background, for example).  A bootstrap without Java doesn't
 S> cause any difficulty at all.

Same here.  Now I understand why bootstrapping takes such an insane
amount of time.

Come on people, this is not reasonable.  I know there are ways of
doing software builds that don't require infinite memory.  For a
library build to take more memory than the entire M$ Office package is
not right.

I'm using a 3 year old laptop with an unusually large RAM, but even so
I run into this problem.  If it's really the intent that all GCC
contributors must have a brand new computer with at least 1 GB of
memory, you should say so on the "how to contribute" webpage -- and
plan to lose a lot of support.

This issue should go into the buglist as a high priority bug.

     paul