>   koffice was building perfectly -- until it hit:

Yeah. Been there done that. :) I submitted a bug report to split the koffice package into smaller modules.

>   Looks like kis_png_converter.cc needs patching. I'll
> see if I can figure it out based on the gwenview patch. I think that is all it
> needs.  If anyone is good with this and can beat me to it, my hat is off to you.

There was a patch to that same file 2012-01-11. I suspect the libpng 1.5 changes require a similar change.

http://www.trinitydesktop.org/patches/1326328201:b180811d9a814c638032f77aaf02e84a3126328c.diff

>   And wow - processor speed really makes a huge
> difference in build times. For the packages I'm building on arch:
> 
> i686 build - old p4 2800
> 
>   Build time 462 min. ~ 7.7 hours
> 
> x86_64 build - newer (but old) 9850 X4
> 
>   Build time 224 min. ~ 3.7 hours
> 
>   Never really built projects this large before, but speed -- does matter :)

Yes, speed is good for development but bad for users. Developers get accustomed to their scream demons and then forget to test on older hardware.

I have tried several times to use ccache to improve build times, but I never have gotten that process to work for me. I want to try distcc because I have two dual core machines here. I'm just not sure I want to burn the extra wattage.

If your new system is multi-core then use parallel processing. The general guideline is NUM_CORES + 1. I have a dual core and set NUMJOBS=-j3. My build scripts then run make $NUMJOBS.

Check the wiki but I believe only two packages fail to build with parallel processing: tdebindings and tdemultimedia.

Darrell