[gentoo-dev] Re: Gentoo's problems

[Steve Long]

George Prowse wrote:
> Caleb Cushing wrote:
>> How about the speed of search's? the speed of resolving dependancy's?
>> how about the speed that it takes to calculate a dependancy listing
>> after you've already done it once? portage is SLOW.
> So speed...
>
Re: speed of searches, try qsearch from portage-utils. (man q)

The major bugbear I always had was the cache update on sync. So I groused
about in #gentoo-portage and zmedico pointed me to
FEATURES="-metadata-transfer" As someone else said to me it's in man
portage. (You need to erase your /var/cache/edb) I'd only ever run man
emerge, and suddenly found out a whole new load of stuff! Only prob I've
run into is kuroo can't deal with it.

As for dependency resolution I've been running portage like a dog to develop
that script, and I've never really got bothered by it (although I used to
when I wasn't enjoying running emerge.) And it *is* faster if you do it
more than once.

(I only have a 1.67GHz Athlon-XP with 512Mb so it's not like I'm running the
fastest machine out there. I installed a dual-Opteron with 2G for someone
and it was nothing.) The compile time is much worse than the dep-resol'n.

In terms of interface the thing that really got me was failures when running
long emerges, and the compiler output meaning I missed important messages,
as I got so used to tons of output on my screen. That's what the script is
for, and since I've been using that, gentoo is absolutely perfect. So it's
command line. So what, it's a doddle to use Kommander if I were bothered.

All I need now is to beg some of solar's bin-handling stuff, as from what
i've seen, that will be the next big thing for gentoo. It'll certainly make
my life easier :D


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