I can see lack of tutorials on apt-build around, so if somebody would be interested to make one, it would be helpful!
I remember that many years ago it helped to make Ubuntu on a weak net-top work like a breeze after 23 hours of crunching. (It was faster to let it go busy, than to learn how to off-load the task to another system and correctly transfer the results back.)
For your inspiration let me list the things that would be really cool to see on such page!
Downsides and risks. Concerning security, usability, and :idk: what else affected (recovery facilities?).
Impact on system RAM usage and storage usage.
Are there any nuances regarding Pop OS in contrast to general Debian/Ubuntu family.
Any details regarding Qemu/KVM — both as host and guest. If it affects this technology at all (or doing it controversially).
(I couldn’t find an appropriate category – pls move to the relevant.)
I think it tends to be assumed that people building apps from source code have some knowkedge, so I dont think you will find an elementary tutorial.
Regards
Neville
@skaunov ,
If you are interested in building packzges from source, you should learn to use Gentoo.
The portage system in Gentoo is tailored for source cide buikding.
I have done a source code build in Debian, but I did not use apt-build. I just downloaded the source code and built it by hand, so I kept it out of the package system
Yeah, I would argue that Gentoo approach is deeper than packages — it helps you to customize the whole system to your needs. And I feel that Gentoo could be tedious for Itsfoss reader beyond the concept and who and when use it.
apt-build world is fun since you have very same system on the output, but tailored to run on your hardware, but preserving all good and bad functionality it had with binary packages.
Yeah, it is a beast to install, but once you have it setup, it is about an hour per week of updating. I have one installation, and I am using it, just to see what it is like for daily work.
Yes I agree. I might give it a try on Debian. Optimising for my hardware interests me for some packages, especially R which I use for a computation.
It turns out that the package is abandoned and orphaned.
Probably there is just no need in such levels of optimization currently among users en masse. And for those who actually need it there is blessed Gentoo.
Still I would be glad to see such a write-up on Itsfloss as an historical review. Though I guess such nostalgic note would be against the tone of the outlet.
I can’t say about deprecated as in “deprecated” — it’s on the repo ready for you to install. But AFAIU it has no maintener and received no updates for years.
I still feel like giving it a try. I think with Debian in a VM…
If it works we might try and write something.
I think people would at least be interested in how to optimize one package… doing world would be less likely to appeal.
@skaunov ,
Some apt-build say to avoid compiling gcc/g++
But there is also this comment
I find that instead of using apt-build world it's better to download a "Linux from Scratch"
book, and do apt-build for every package listed in it. It specifies the correct order etc.
For example I'm not sure, if apt-build world knows it should first recompile binutils,
then gcc, then binutils again, gcc again, then programming languages, gzip etc.
It seems it just compiles everything alphabetically.
which is the way Gentoo proceeds.
So it is important to understand why gcc needs to be compiled first, or does it
really need to be? There is also this comment
It wouldn't matter. LFS does that to avoid leaving any dependencies on libraries
in the host system, but here it's just replacing everything in-place with compiled
versions; they'll still be in the same location, have the same ABI, etc.
so if it is just a side issue, we dont need to worry about gcc, or do we?
As I see it, it is just about using the optimized gcc to compile everything else, so we compile gcc first. What if there is rust code… that is coming soon?
Thank you for the suggestion. I’ll be honest. I have no experience and thus no expertise with the apt-build tool. This doesn’t mean I cannot experiment with it
I liked that you used the forum to request a tutorial on the topic of your choice.
I am going to create a new category/tag for topic requests. This will help keep track of things
That gives me the opportunity to reveal the plan of readers created tutorials on the community forum. There is already a category for such tutorials. Just not too organized at the moment. I’ll spend some time refining it.
@nevj , it seems to me you’re on the right way — I just have nothing to add to your notes. X)
@abhishek , nice to see you with us. I have to use Tor to connect to the forum, while everything else works well. Looks like collateral ban to me (governmental). I guess the impact is so small that it’s just me alone. If you would still like to look into this — drop me a line pls, and I will provide you with debugging/diagnosis info.
I think I should ignore compiling gcc for the moment, as the docs advise. Optimizing the compiler is a much more in-depth and specialist topic. We can look at that later.
I think Debian in VM is not a good choice. I have downloaded Ubuntu 23.04 and will do a hard install and try it there. Need to avoid complications of VM. Lets hope Ubuntu works with my new graphics card. Never had Ubuntu before, so I may learn something.
I can see lack of tutorials on 
