Re: [gentoo-dev] [QA] New policy: 'files' directory must not be larger than 32 KiB

[Francesco Riosa]

On 12/18/17 14:01, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 7:45 AM, Francesco Riosa <vivo75@×××××.com> wrote:
>> It would be interesting instead to evaluate ways to remove _all_ files/ dirs
>> from the tree, keeping ebuilds separated from data.
> Arguably you could go a step further and not distribute even the
> ebuilds except on demand.  Just have an index of what packages exist
> and enough dependency info to avoid having to churn with ebuild
> fetches in order to resolve them.
interesting point of view but this would require major refactoring of
portage and providing a resilient and capable infrastructure to serve
the ebuilds on demand.
Removing just files/ dirs  would require no modification to portage and
a load on infra that is probably much lighter (dependant on
implementation chosen)

> You could view ebuilds as source code - certainly important, but not
> necessarily the best thing to just have sitting around on your hard
> drive when not needed.
Personally, most of the time I do see  them exactly this way, but not a
big fuss either
>
> Whether we remove all files/ or the entire package dir from the repo,
> I'd suggest that this become more standardized if we wanted to go down
> one of these roads.  Instead of sticking something in SRC_URI and so
> on, it might be best if files (or packages) be kept in a standard
> mirrored location, and the package manager would just automatically
> find/fetch them if they exist and extract them to a standard location.
> Then any package that uses files/ can do so in a more standardized
> way.
Provided exact source of upstream files is kept near the ebuild the idea
is tantalizing.
A per repository base SRC_URI and "automatic" downloads of packages files

>
> This also would fix some existing issues with non-upstream distfiles,
> where they get stored in various random locations and aren't
> necessarily available long-term.  This has been a topic that comes up
> from time to time, especially if somebody is trying to build from an
> old version of the repo.  Something like genkernel patches or whatever
> would just go in files/ since the size limit is now gone and they'd
> presumably be archived forever.
>
another good point, it would be probably a good time to split $DISTDIR
in per package directory, big number of inodes in that dir has also been
a source of problems in the past, especially for mirror owners.