Re: [gentoo-dev] FEATURES to cut the excess in portage

[Brian Jackson]

Look into INSTALL_MASK.

--Brian Jackson


On Nov 5, 2006, at 12:02 PM, John Jawed wrote:

> Two patches which allow a user to bypass files created with doman and
> dodoc in FEATURES:
>
> FEATURES="noman nodoc" emerge -av foo
>
> http://jawed.name/dev/gentoo/nodoc.patch
> http://jawed.name/dev/gentoo/noman.patch
>
> Quick background/inspiration:
>
> I found myself having to make an initrd suitable to do PXE boots for
> our business and educational clusters. I was exploiting the ever so
> useful ROOT option for portage to emerge packages into the initrd
> build directory. However, because this was an initrd being sent over
> the network, total size was important.
>
> At larger sizes the loading the initrd would actually cause a kernel
> panic on pivoting root...whether this was a result of a kernel config,
> a set maximum size limit, or something else I'm not exactly sure of.
>
> Looking at the output of du, I started first by removing the man and
> documentation files. This brought the size of my final initrd down
> significantly (~287MiB to ~242MiB).
>
> Possible issues/bigger picture:
>
> While I was making the changes to doman and prepman, I kept thinking
> of how this really is part of a bigger picture, [I think] maybe the
> whole minimal concept should be abstracted out of USE (for packages
> that have it) and be part of FEATURES (for all packages).
> In my case because I was using ROOT in portage to build out an initrd,
> I didn't really need or want man or documentation for the packages I
> was putting in.
>
> At the end of the day, maybe there should be a specific mix of
> FEATURES such as "nodoc noman" and/or a granular mix of "minimal"
> which encompasses the previous+more. Obviously it's open for a lot of
> discussion and the patches attached should/would probably not be a
> final solution...the goal was that this would be a start.
>
> We've been using this patch and it's worked out for us well. Your
> mileage may vary, if it does, please say something! :-)
>
> Thanks,
> John
>
> PS Sorry to the devs I was working with (you know who you are :-) for
> my inactivity lately...moving my life 1600 miles on a weeks' notice
> hasn't exactly been the easiest thing, definitely hasn't helped for
> the free time column.
> --
> gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list
>

-- 
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list