-----Original Message----- From: Jonathan Hutchins

On Thursday 03 February 2005 09:57 am, you wrote:

...

You can strip the debug code out of compiled gentoo programs.

Sure. By recompiling them.

Were you thinking of some other method?

Yes, a utility called "strip" will strip the debugging headers out of code. It make the programs smaller and often faster. It doesn't recompile the code. Don't ask me how, I haven't bothered to look at the code. It can be done with any Linux distro, but it makes debugging impossible, so use with caution. I think they recommend against stripping the kernel. ;')

...

Also, it would require an expert to know what flags to set

to optimize

...

compiling.

Actually, this is one thing I _have_ been able to find a lot of information about in the gentoo forums, as well as some other on-line forums. Googling for "use flags" and your architecture will find a lot of discussion and advice.

Yes, but you have to use them, and you haven't given us poor souls the magic combination. So anyone just pulling down gentoo and compiling wouldn't necessarily know how to optimize. So to say "compile gentoo, don't use compiled gentoo" does nothing to improve the speed of the installed system. Now if you had said "compile gentoo with the compile options -abc#@$%%%^$###..., don't use compiled gentoo", or something similar, then I might agree with you. But I doubt it. I'm skeptical of how much more performance you can get out of gentoo by compiling as opposed to using their pre-optimized binaries. At least not with older stock equipment.