Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: "Aaron W. Swenson" <titanofold@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] About suggesting to create a separate partition for portage tree in handbook
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 18:22:15
Message-Id: 4F720511.4080504@gentoo.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] About suggesting to create a separate partition for portage tree in handbook by Sven Vermeulen
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4 On 03/27/2012 02:01 PM, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
5 > On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 07:49:00PM +0200, Pacho Ramos wrote:
6 >> I am a bit surprised handbook still doesn't suggest people to
7 >> create a separate partition for /usr/portage tree. I remember my
8 >> first Gentoo systems had it inside / and that lead to a lot of
9 >> fragmentation, much slower "emerge -pvuDN world" (I benchmarked
10 >> it when I changed my partitioning scheme to put /usr/portage)
11 >> separate and a lot of disk space lost (I remember portage tree
12 >> reached around 3 GB of disk space while I am now running with
13 >> 300MB)
14 >>
15 >> Could handbook suggest people to put /usr/portage on a different
16 >> partition then? The only doubt I have is what filesystem would be
17 >> better for it, in my case I am using reiserfs with tail enabled,
18 >> but maybe you have other different setups.
19 >
20 > To be honest, I don't think it is wise to describe it in the Gentoo
21 > Handbook just yet. I don't mind having it documented elsewhere, but
22 > the separate partition is not mandatory for getting Gentoo up and
23 > running. The instructions currently also just give an example
24 > partition layout and tell users that different layouts are
25 > perfectly possible.
26 >
27 > We need to take into consideration what is needed (must) for a
28 > Gentoo installation, what is seriously recommended (should), what
29 > is nice to have (could), etc. And for me, having a separate
30 > /usr/portage is a nice-to-have imo.
31 >
32 > Wkr, Sven Vermeulen
33 >
34
35 Definitely. The handbook should only cover simple, straightforward
36 setups. New users are already overwhelmed by the handbook as it is.
37 Going into details about alternate setups would only increase the
38 number of "Is there a quick start guide somewhere that I can follow"
39 or "which setup is best" questions that we currently get in #gentoo
40 and friends.
41
42 If anything, I'd recommend we remove some details, like getting rid of
43 the 'mirrorselect' command. (Too many people run into a non-starter
44 because of it.)
45
46 - - Aaron
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