Re: [gentoo-performance] Re: portage performance

[Brian Harring]

On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 10:23, Blue Cantral wrote:
> Re the amount of files involved in rsync. There is a script
> floating around the forum making use of the exclude
> function of rsync. This reduced the amount of files in my
> average rsync to well under a quarter. Very nice little
> script :p As soon as I get to a pc I'll look and send a
> link.
I think I might have been one of the peeps who tore into that script a
bit- I view it akin to morphine, yeah, it makes things seem so much
better, but sooner or later long term usage will blow out your liver and
then your screwed. :-)

Excluding portions of the tree for rsync is potentially quite dangerous-
dev's w/ cvs access likely have seen this, if you aren't updating the
*entire* tree, sooner or later a package creeps in that has a dep that
cannot be satisfied by the user's local multi-version repository.

The problem w/ most exclude attempts is that to limit the sync to just
the installed packages, you're not checking out potential deps.  Fex,
you've emerged mplayer, but never had the aalib flag on.  You decide you
want to watch your files using the ascii video extension, flip on
USE="aalib", and emerge mplayer.

If you've been using the exclude script, and don't have aalib installed,
your mplayer is built against the version you had when you decided
syncing the whole tree was a pita- instead of version 1.0, you end up w/
the first import of the ebuild, 0.1 (as an example).

Another example, you've never installed rzip (nifty compressor), and
decide to take it for a spin.  If you've been using the rsync exclude
for any length of time, your rsync ebuilds are now *way* behind what the
tree currently has.  You're emerging an older version, that may not even
be in the tree anymore.

Last time this was brought up, it was pointed out that you could just go
and resync the package you're about to emerge.  This doesn't work
incredibly well, since you have to sync the deps also.
~brian