Make configuration

[Peter Hofer]

> People from PC-BSD were recently discussing sense of supporting 386
> processors and finally decided, that they will change CPUTYPE in
> /etc/make.conf to i686.

Can you provide a link to this discussion?

> They said that in fact any computer able to run KDE 
> should have 686-compatibile processor. Maybe that's what should also
> DesktopBSD do?

Although virtually every computer DesktopBSD runs on has an i686 processor, I 
think that's a bad idea:

- Performance improvements are *very* minimal.
- The FreeBSD base system and ports usually aren't tested with optimizations
  and can get unstable or crash in the worst case.
- Many programs ignore optimization flags in the build process anyway, in
  some cases compilation or linking fails because of them.

Instead of saving seconds, you will more likely end up spending hours on 
solving problems caused by such flags. Since this is DesktopBSD, this is 
nothing our users should have to do, so it's much safer to stay with the 
well-tested FreeBSD defaults, even if CPUTYPE is not such a big change as 
"-O2" optimization, for example.

By the way, support for 80386 processors was removed in FreeBSD 5 anyway.

Peter