Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: moving default location of portage tree

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Jul 9, 2018 at 2:11 PM Johannes Huber <johu@g.o> wrote:
>
> Am 09.07.2018 um 20:05 schrieb Rich Freeman:
> > On Mon, Jul 9, 2018 at 1:40 PM Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o> wrote:
> >>
> >>>>>>> On Mon, 9 Jul 2018, William Hubbs wrote:
> >>
> >>> is there a tracker for when the portage tree can be moved out of
> >>> /usr/portage by default?
> >>
> >>> If not, what is the status of us being able to do this?
> >>
> >> Please remind me, what was the plan for the new location?
> >> Somewhere under /var/db or /var/lib, IIRC?
> >>
> >
> > I'd also consider /var/cache here as well.  FHS specifically suggests
> > using it for web caches and the like (let's set aside the issue with
> > making that global), though for the most part it is more metadata
> > caching.  A key principle is that it can be wiped without loss of
> > data, and I think that is generally true for the repository since it
> > can be synced.
> >
> > Stuff in /var/lib can't be deleted without some kind of loss of
> > application state.  /var/db isn't in FHS, and I note that even mysql
> > sticks its stuff in /var/lib.
> >
>
> Imho it would make sense to split up portage files with this change.
> Move the tree (ebuilds, profiles etc) to /var/lib/... and the metadata
> cache to /var/db as it can be regenerated out of the tree.
>

Are you talking about the metadata that gets synced as part of the
repository?  Conceptually I like the idea of splitting it out, but IMO
the whole repository is really just one big cache, so keeping it
together since it always has to be consistent isn't a huge problem.

If you're talking about the stuff in /var/cache/edb, then that should
be separate from the repository, but should still be in cache.

I'd probably create /var/cache/portage, with subdirectories for
repositories (with a subdir for each one synced by portage), edb,
distfiles, and binary packages.
/var/cache/portage/repos/main
/var/cache/portage/repos/my-favorite-overlay
/var/cache/portage/distfiles
/var/cache/portage/edb

The stuff in /var/db/pkg should probably go in /var/lib/portage/pkg or
something like that, at least long-term.

-- 
Rich