Ideas for Portage

[alechiko]

I wonder if this has been considered already or not. Im sure if it has ill be shot down quickly by the various folk in this community!

Gentoo is all about customizability right? Id love to see the option to customize portage's emerge sync more. When gentoo started out, an "emerge sync" could be done relatively quickly. Now that more and more packages have been added, even with a fast connection (ok really really fast ones dont count for this) it can take quite a while to download a recent portage tree. Lets face it, maybe half or more of the packages in that tree you will never use.

Firstly, it would be great to see portage being changed to be architecture specific. If you dont have amd64 or sparc or whatever, then it would be great if you could only download ebuilds for your architecture when you sync. Just like you can put for example -KDE -qt in your USE flags in make.conf it would be really cool if you could just not download all the KDE ebuilds when you Sync.

Im not sure how feasable this idea is or if the developers are already working on something like this in the background but i just wanted to suggest the idea incase

akiru
_________________
None

[plbe]

If I'm not mistaken you can already tell portage to ignore certain ebuilds or directories

[Duty]

/etc/portage/rsync_excludes

This can break ebuilds, though. It would be nice if Portage had more elegant handling for when an possibly rsync_excluded dependency is not found.

[iTux]

Hi,

Very few ebuilds are architecture specific.
I can only think of boot loaders, x86-only or other pre-compiled binaries and things like Mac-on-Linux

So the USE flags thing would be the way to start.

Agree that the full tree might not be needed.

Not that dependences are always computed on the tree. So, would need something smart enough to have at least ebuilds of all dependencies and to get these if dependencies change.

Download speed? It takes about 2 min to sync on a 56K modem... Hint, try to sync more often.

Updating the portage cache at the end does take quite some computation time. There also disk space taken by portage tree.

But there is all that source code to download and store. So Gentoo is already not appropriate for low-disk space low Internet connection systems... Unless you compile on other system and download on other system.

So I think development time might be better spent to speed up computation of dependies and of portage cache.

But there are several developers working in different areas and hopefully it will keep improving

iTux

[alechiko]

Ill refer back to the portage documentation then thx guys.

akiru
_________________
None