[gentoo-user] Portage improved

[Peter Humphrey <peter@prh.myzen.co.uk>]

Greetings,

I see that the latest version of portage has improved the handling of giant 
packages. Today I had a few dozen kde-frameworks packages to install, together 
with webkit-gtk. That job was near the top of the list, so it was started 
before most of the kde ones. I have this in make.conf:

$ grep '\-j' /etc/portage/make.conf
EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--jobs=24 --load-average=30 [...]"
MAKEOPTS="-j16 -l16"

(64GB, 24 CPU threads)

The CPU load then rose quickly past 40 as the kde packages got stuck in, up to 
24 total jobs. I was surprised and pleased to see that packages were made to 
pause until cores became available. This process was progressive until the 
load came down again.

That's a big improvement, and I'd like to commend the team on it.

Just one little fly in the ointment: the status string became too long to show 
properly. Perhaps shorter phrases could be used, or numbers limited to two 
digits, or the 80-character line limit exceeded while running in an x-term.

Anyway, well done the team!

-- 
Regards,
Peter.