You have pretty powerful laptop I'd say [LWN.net]

You have pretty powerful laptop I'd say

Posted Oct 21, 2008 18:39 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Involvement by sladen
Parent article: Android source available

If somebody can build-test cycle the whole thing on their laptop in under five minutes, they tend to be more likely to be involved and more likely to join the club.

Can you do this with Firefox? Or with kernel? Or with GNOME (let's forget about KDE)?

This thing looks pretty modular (they are using multiple Git's repositories!), supplied scripts only make it easier to compile and build the whole thing without hassle.

That being said it's not just a bunch of well-known open-source libraries. That is kinda the point...

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You have pretty powerful laptop I'd say

Posted Oct 21, 2008 18:54 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

GNOME and KDE are indeed much more modular. They are composed of many sub packages, and you can have a partial build of those separately (and fix separately.

The kernel tree is huge, but if you just want to quick-fix a module rather than the core, you can do that. Still, this "big" amounts to 200MB of disk space required (or so).

I'm not sure about Firefox,

You have pretty powerful laptop I'd say

Posted Oct 21, 2008 19:14 UTC (Tue) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

> I'm not sure about Firefox,

For Firefox you need 700 MB for sources and 1.2GB for the build. This is on Fedora-9.

A full rebuild of the browser takes 11 minutes on 4-core 2.6 GHz Xenon or about 80 minutes on 1.1 GHz single-core laptop. But after that minor patching typically leads to 3-5 minutes of wait-time even on the laptop or some seconds on that server using official build instructions. With some knowledge of the build system and depending on the subsystem, one may cut that incremental build time by factor of 10.