| 1 |
On Tue, 2012-03-27 at 20:01 +0200, Sven Vermeulen wrote: |
| 2 |
> On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 07:49:00PM +0200, Pacho Ramos wrote: |
| 3 |
> > I am a bit surprised handbook still doesn't suggest people to create a |
| 4 |
> > separate partition for /usr/portage tree. I remember my first Gentoo |
| 5 |
> > systems had it inside / and that lead to a lot of fragmentation, much |
| 6 |
> > slower "emerge -pvuDN world" (I benchmarked it when I changed my |
| 7 |
> > partitioning scheme to put /usr/portage) separate and a lot of disk |
| 8 |
> > space lost (I remember portage tree reached around 3 GB of disk space |
| 9 |
> > while I am now running with 300MB) |
| 10 |
> > |
| 11 |
> > Could handbook suggest people to put /usr/portage on a different |
| 12 |
> > partition then? The only doubt I have is what filesystem would be better |
| 13 |
> > for it, in my case I am using reiserfs with tail enabled, but maybe you |
| 14 |
> > have other different setups. |
| 15 |
> |
| 16 |
> To be honest, I don't think it is wise to describe it in the Gentoo Handbook |
| 17 |
> just yet. I don't mind having it documented elsewhere, but the separate |
| 18 |
> partition is not mandatory for getting Gentoo up and running. The |
| 19 |
> instructions currently also just give an example partition layout and tell |
| 20 |
> users that different layouts are perfectly possible. |
| 21 |
> |
| 22 |
> We need to take into consideration what is needed (must) for a Gentoo |
| 23 |
> installation, what is seriously recommended (should), what is nice to have |
| 24 |
> (could), etc. And for me, having a separate /usr/portage is a nice-to-have |
| 25 |
> imo. |
| 26 |
|
| 27 |
The partitioning scheme is something that the user needs to decide on |
| 28 |
*before* getting Gentoo up and running. After the user had finished |
| 29 |
installing the operating system, it's too late to inform him about the |
| 30 |
advantages of a separate /usr/portage. |
| 31 |
|
| 32 |
IMHO, chapter 4 of the handbook needs the following changes: |
| 33 |
|
| 34 |
1. ext4, not ext3, needs to be recommended as the default filesystem. We |
| 35 |
have kernel 3.2 marked stable, there is no need to keep talking about |
| 36 |
ext4 as if it's something experimental. |
| 37 |
|
| 38 |
2. The handbook should mention that a separate small /usr/portage |
| 39 |
partition can noticeably improve performance for users with a rotational |
| 40 |
hard drive, and that it's not needed for solid-state drives. It should |
| 41 |
also mention that using Gentoo with a separate /usr/portage partition |
| 42 |
will require some additional configuration (such as changing DISTDIR and |
| 43 |
PKGDIR to avoid running out of space). |
| 44 |
|
| 45 |
-Alexandre. |
Archives