[gentoo-embedded] Some question about gentoo/openmoko

[Nicola Mfb]

Hi!
I'm using gentoo on freerunner and I'm quite happy with it. Actually I'm
emerging natively to have access to a bigger number of applications than
using cross-compilation and to help in ~arm keywording. To avoid taking the
phone at home, emerging stuff and breaking the SD card with too many writes,
I'm using a qemu-system-arm box building binary packages, and it's really
slow (but faster the real device), for example qt 4.5.0 compiled in about 1
week. As of this I'm trying to avoid perodic "emerge -e", and reuse the
stuff already emerged, so I need some tips to mantain a coerhent build
system.

Last night I updated the openmoko overlay and noted that the xorg-server
ebuild was updated, but when doing emerge -DuNpv world it did not appear in
the list of rebuilding package. I think this is due the fact that the
package did not changed the revision number. So is it possible to tell
emerge to check that the ebuild was effectively changed for example checking
the /var/db/pkg/* stuff? As alternative is there a ready to use script to do
these cheks?

The second question is about dependencies as it may be that some packages in
the last weeks loosed or gained some dependencies, or that them was
autopicked from filesystem with autotools, to clean the system is the
"emerge -e world && emerge --depclean && revdev-rebuild" the only solution?

May I suppose that cleaning /var/lib/portage/world from stuff, doing
"ROOT=/stage4 emerge -gK world", chrooting to /stage4 and doing
revdev-rebuild take me to the same results? May I produce a stage3 in the
same way?

And last! do you know some fastand cheap arm based hardware I may use for
arm native compilation? I'm interested in
http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/24/marvells-sheevaplug-linux-pc-fits-in-its-power-adapter/but
I did not know if I may have issues using the openmoko toolchain on
it.

Thanks

     Nicola