[gentoo-portage-dev] portage doc & cache

[Philippe Lafoucrière]

Hi all

I'm wondering where I can find some doc about portage, and especially 
the cache part. I use debian at work, and get so sad when doing an 
emerge rsync at home (10 or 15 minutes to rsync, and almost 5 minutes to 
calculate world dependancies) on a bi-athlon 1.8GHz.

I just wanted to check that the cache system is really a cache :)

maybe ebuilds should be "compiled" into seriaziled objects or something 
similar. Only an emerge rsync (or something called "emerge update") 
would fetch new ebuilds, and compile new ones (we don't care anymore of 
hand modified files after sync).



On the other hand, I was thinkink of the "rsync way" to synchronise the 
portage tree. Why don't we use a portage tree ID (incremented each time 
an ebuild is commited to CVS). For exemple, I have the tree number 
12512. Current portage tree ID is 12514. I just need too fresh ebuilds.

I don't think it would be really difficult to implement a server that 
would handle requests like :

- "tell me which files where updated since 12512"
- "files are :
foo.ebuild
bar.ebuild"
[emerge is download foo.ebuild, bar.ebuild here]

Moreover, do I REALLY need all ebuilds content ???? Why can't portage 
just look at some headers (with arch, desc, etc.) and left the install 
part on other files. Rsync local tree would be lighter, and faster to 
sync. When you need to emerge some program, emerge would download the 
_real_ ebuild file, the digests, the distfiles, etc.

The headers can also be contained in one large tar.gz file, to reduce 
bandwith again (I know, like debian).

I know this stuff might let you think I'm crazy to rebuild all portage, 
but here are some ideas to dig :D


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