On Fri, 2004-09-03 at 10:19 -0400, James Knott wrote:
I've noticed that online updates appear to be compiled from source.
I'm not sure if I understand you correctly. SuSE have compiled them from source, yes, of course. They're not compiled locally on your machine when you install them. That's a gentoo thing (and *BSD)
Does this mean that they've been compiled specifically for the cpu (AMD, P4 etc.).
SuSE compiles them for generic i586, except for glibc which has an i586 and an i686 version Of course the x86_64 version has its own updates
If so, would it be possible to make the entire system compiled for specific cpu, by "updating" everything?
Not just by running online update, no. You'd have to recompile all the rpms, giving proper --target parameters, possibly editing the rpm config flags if you want to use more aggressive optimising CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS