Re: [gentoo-dev] About suggesting to create a separate partition for portage tree in handbook

[Pacho Ramos]

Will start to reply but will take some time as I don't have much this
days :(

El mar, 27-03-2012 a las 20:01 +0200, Sven Vermeulen escribió:
> On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 07:49:00PM +0200, Pacho Ramos wrote:
> > I am a bit surprised handbook still doesn't suggest people to create a
> > separate partition for /usr/portage tree. I remember my first Gentoo
> > systems had it inside / and that lead to a lot of fragmentation, much
> > slower "emerge -pvuDN world" (I benchmarked it when I changed my
> > partitioning scheme to put /usr/portage) separate and a lot of disk
> > space lost (I remember portage tree reached around 3 GB of disk space
> > while I am now running with 300MB)
> >
> > Could handbook suggest people to put /usr/portage on a different
> > partition then? The only doubt I have is what filesystem would be better
> > for it, in my case I am using reiserfs with tail enabled, but maybe you
> > have other different setups.
>
> To be honest, I don't think it is wise to describe it in the Gentoo Handbook
> just yet. I don't mind having it documented elsewhere, but the separate
> partition is not mandatory for getting Gentoo up and running. The
> instructions currently also just give an example partition layout and tell
> users that different layouts are perfectly possible.
>
> We need to take into consideration what is needed (must) for a Gentoo
> installation, what is seriously recommended (should), what is nice to have
> (could), etc. And for me, having a separate /usr/portage is a nice-to-have
> imo.
>
> Wkr,
> 	Sven Vermeulen
>
>

My idea is to add a comment about this because it's not obvious having
portage tree in a "common" partition with the rest of the system has
some problems like high fragmentation, waste of disk space and also
performance problems. I discovered it empirically when trying to get
"emerge -pvuDN world" a bit faster. 

Also, once a partition scheme is chosen when installing Gentoo at first
time, it's sometimes difficult to modify (for example, I was luck in my
cases because I had big swap partitions I shrinked a bit for portage
tree.

You can probably see it's "nice-to-have" (as partition scheme that is
shown in handbook showing partitions for /var, /home...), but it's
better than letting people put their portage trees in a standard
partition with the rest of the system