> > > only one use flag combination you are looking at ~0451
> >
> > Sorry this should read:
> > "only one cflag combination you are looking at ~10451"
>
> Where did you get that number?
As I stated originally it is a "very rough calculation".
I took the number of packages in tree and multiplied this by the average size 
of packages I do have. I then multiplied by the average quantity of use flags 
a package has and an estimate on the average amount of dependencies a package 
has.
I suspect the actual number would be even higher as it is likely I 
underestimated on dependencies.
Regardless this is for one set of CFLAGS and one ARCH, the space required to 
do this for even a few reasonable CFLAG sets and a few architectures is going 
to be astronomical.
> Did you really compile everything in the
> tree?
No, If I had that sort of compute power and hard drive space available I would 
definitely just host binaries for everyone and this entire idea would then not 
be necessary.
> Well, I don't think that's needed. I use FEATURES="buildpackage"
> on all my machines. My headless server uses 1.2 GB, my workstation with
> GNOME, KDE 4.2 and stuff like firefox, tunderbird, octave, openoffice
> and much more uses 6.0 GB and my second, more minimal desktop uses 1.7
> GB. I did not run eclean-pkg in a while, so that should be much more
> than I really need.
But you only have packages for one set of USE flags, as portage does not 
currently store packages for different USE flags.
Unless you are implying that the majority of users all have the same 
CFLAGS/Use flags and Programs as you it is unlikely that your 6 GB set would 
be anywhere near close to being able to provide usable binaries for many 
people.
> So, if you start with, say, some basic i686 profile and really basic
> CFLAGS and not build too much stuff (Desktop environments, FF, TB, OOo)
> it should not use too much diskspace. From there it would be really
> interesting to share packages, I think. We definitively have some
> packages, that do not depend on architecture. If somebody wants to have
> different USE-flags it would be interesting to just build the packages
> with the different USE-flags again, not everything.
Sure even having the basic stuff available is a nice *start* but where are 
they going to be hosted and who is going to compile them, and using what 
server?
I am not sure what you mean here by not building everything again?
> In my opinion, the ultimate goal would be to provide software that any
> organization running Gentoo Linux (a school, university, company) could
> set up their own buildserver and either let other people mirror that
> once a day or something (minimizing traffic) or provide the packages to
> anybody who wants them on a server. Sometimes these organizations will
> employ Gentoo developers or the responsible guy there will become one,
> then he could set up some infrastructure to sign packages and they
> could be trusted.
See user type 2 and 3 in my original message.