2008/4/17, Jens M Andreasen <jens.andreasen(a)comhem.se>se>:
You are assuming that the original unpaid developer
owns any of the
fancy hardware in question? That is in the general case - to put it
mildly - a stretch.
This depends on how much work/money the individual dev wants to put
into his project. Obviously this varies widely.
As has been shown in a previous thread,
auto-vectorization is taking off
in a major way approaching and occasionally going beyond what a skilled
ASM programmer can accomplish. If I have understood the gcc mailing-list
correctly, this will go into the next version (4.3?) as default for -O3
The original programmer may not be aware of this, need not even be alive
for a distributor to type 'make world -O3 -msse4.1' (or some such) which
will optimize /everything/ for that processor architecture.
I think we are mixing up some problems here. If you are packaging an
existing piece of legacy software you will likely take a different
approach then when you are the original author of a program and you
are interested in getting the best performance for as many users as
possible with a minmal amount of fuzz for them.
The application on the end-user system sometimes
known as the
packet-manager should be able to know where it lives and dive into the
network directory corresponding that architecture. No need for manual
support.
Setting up the infrastructure and getting distributions/packaging
software to support this will be much more work. As far as I know a
solution like this has not been implemented yet, and it is not likely
to happen, imho.
About NFS mount of /usr ... Are you sure that is such
a wise decision
these days considering current prices of local storage? What happens
when the user unplugs his laptop and walks away?
This was just one of the many examples to point out what could
"potentially" go wrong if one starts to implement hodgepodge
solutions. But anyways, not everyones setup compares to anyone elses
setup, aiming for universalism where possible is surely what I
consider a best practice.
Cheers
-Richard
PS.: The correct response to "This is Madness" is of course: "Thiiiis
issss SPARTA!!!" ;-) :-P *lol*
--
Don't contribute to the Y10K problem!