Hi list,


I cross-compiled via the build tarball now, following the installation
instructions in INSTALL-BUILD up to the end. Two things came to my mind:

First, it ends with 'now follow the configure steps in the install
guide on www.gentoo.org'. As far as I read the documentation on the
site and the files from ibiblio.org, I built my own .tbz2 archive to
roast a cd-rom with it and then install it to my laptop. But some
users might not be as tremendously bright and clever -- and good-looking,
come to speak of it -- as I am and might be lost right at this point.
'follow the instructions' should at least include a pointer similar to
'from point XX on'.


Second, after having built everything, I ran

tar --numeric-owner -cvjpf gentoo-built-cockteau.tbz2 .

with cockteau being the name of my laptop. I pressed return, and went
away to make some sandwiches for breakfast, expecting this to last for
some minutes even on an athlon 800 with 256 megs of ram. But returning
20 minutes later, it was still running; checking the output of
the log file -- I log most things, mind you -- I noticed that the object
files left behind by the compiling process were archived as well as the
contents of /usr/portage/distfiles.

It might be part of a port system to hold copies of the source code
needed to build libs, programs and so on, but it is certainly not
neccessary to hold _two_ copies -- once as tarballs, once unpacked
to the temp dir. And there is absolutely no need to keep over 
400 megabytes of object files. Browsing through the portage.py script
showed me an '--autoclean' option not mentioned in the installation
doc. Does it work? How/where to use it?


(btw, call me a nit-picking, but doesn't portage.py belong into the
site-packages subdir?)


ps: if anyone out there has a short and decent german translation for
the term 'cross compiling', i would love to hear it =)


thorsten

--

thorsten fischer

<frosch at derfrosch dot de>
<tfischer at linux minus magazin dot de>

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