YJL

I was emerging webkit-gtk because I wanted to try out a system status line called wkline, which I first saw about a three days ago when it was trending on GitHub, but I didn’t try it because it required Node/JS at the time for building. I really disliked project like that, written in C, but has very strange dependency for building.

Anyway, I just stuffed it until the author Kim Silkebækken posted a thread on Arch Linux Forums. I decided to check it out again. I was glad I did because it now only relies on make, but not anymore after I tried to emerge net-libs/webkit-gtk-2.0.4. It’s the requirement since the program is WebKit-based, a feature of it.

Of course, I have consulted with genlop for the merge times:

$ sudo genlop -t webkit-gtk
 * net-libs/webkit-gtk

     Sun May 10 23:47:54 2009 >>> net-libs/webkit-gtk-0_p40220
       merge time: 24 minutes and 14 seconds.

     Mon May 11 00:27:28 2009 >>> net-libs/webkit-gtk-0_p40220
       merge time: 15 minutes and 58 seconds.

     Mon May 25 02:54:41 2009 >>> net-libs/webkit-gtk-1.1.7
       merge time: 25 minutes and 58 seconds.

     Tue Jun  2 08:50:51 2009 >>> net-libs/webkit-gtk-1.1.8
       merge time: 29 minutes.

     Wed Sep  2 21:09:49 2009 >>> net-libs/webkit-gtk-1.1.10
       merge time: 32 minutes and 46 seconds.

     Fri Sep 11 18:49:17 2009 >>> net-libs/webkit-gtk-1.1.10
       merge time: 33 minutes and 23 seconds.

     Wed Oct  7 15:05:12 2009 >>> net-libs/webkit-gtk-1.1.10
       merge time: 29 minutes and 23 seconds.

     Sun Oct 18 09:15:12 2009 >>> net-libs/webkit-gtk-1.1.10
       merge time: 26 minutes and 54 seconds.

30 minutes in 2009, even five years later, I believed doubled merge time as the worst scenario was quite safe to presume. I was terribly wrong after 1 hour, 4 minutes, and 49 seconds:

$ sudo genlop -c

 Currently merging 12 out of 12

 * net-libs/webkit-gtk-2.0.4

       current merge time: 1 hour, 4 minutes and 49 seconds.
       ETA: any time now.

The merge time was 100% overdue, I finally came to senses and searched the most important question:

gentoo webkit-gtk compilation time

One from 2012 said 3 hours, another from 2013 said 5 hours. I should have checked with the Internet, I should have thought about the keyword “webkit” has the potential to blow, but I didn’t

I wasted about 1 hour and 30 mintes for 11 packages which I don’t need plus one couldn’t even finish emerging because only god knows how long it takes to compile.

The webkit-gtk compilation time isn’t the only thing, it pulls Ruby. I don’t know why on Earth it needs Ruby, and I don’t really care and I don’t think it’s really optional, I checked Gentoo’s changelog, it seems Ruby is needed to build something. If I didn’t apply -rdoc, there would be ten-something more packages being pulled.

Since I really wanted to try that status line, WebKit-based, one and only, so I thought why not just let Ruby stay since I actually had installed it (1.8.7, now 2.0.0) for lolcat in 2011, and I have passed some scripts I wanted to play with but couldn’t, because they were Ruby. So, Ruby stays even webkit-gtk is never gonna be seen in my shell prompt by any chance.

These days, I really think our software development and the measures taken to achieve the project goals are really questionable, and even, honestly speaking, harmful.