Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo healthy?

[Neil Bothwick]

On Fri, 22 Dec 2006 09:16:10 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:

> I can't believe you are advocating either of those solutions. It means
> you retain 500M worth of tgz'ed portage tree for just in case an ebuild
> leaves the tree. Any custom changes you make to the tree are wiped out
> with the next --sync anyway, so now the user has to remember which ones
> were updated and remember to put them all back.

Except it's not 500MB, as you'll see by looking at the snapshots
directory on any Gentoo mirror. Of course, the fact that portage trees
for the last couple of weeks are nicely tarred up on all the Gentoo
mirrors makes this process pointless anyway :)

> A bin package is equally cumbersome. You will very quickly consume huge
> amounts of disk space - at least equal to all the current packages on
> the system plus old ones that were updated.

Maybe, but they do provide an extremely useful fallback, especially for
those of us running ~arch systems. Being able to roll back to an older,
working version in seconds rather than minutes or hours is a definite
benefit.

> With an average notebook
> 40G drive, that's 40% of your disk space gone right there.

Which is why I have $PKGDIR on an NFS mounted drive. Desktop drives are
big and cheap.

> And the user
> still has to remember which packages are the customized ones.
>
> Trust me, the portage devs have already figured all this out and
> overlays are exactly the solution for this. The user already has to be
> online to have updated, so all he needs do is get the desired ebuild
> from cvs, copy it to /usr/local/portage, block updates to that package
> using package.mask and then GO AWAY AND FORGET ALL ABOUT IT. No more
> maintenance, no monthly tars, no vast amounts of disk space consumed.
> it all just works.

Absolutely. Overlays are there specifically for people who need something
different from the standard portage tree. They are hardly difficult to
use, as long as you know how to use mkdir and cp. When a user has a
system that depends on specific versions of particular packages, all he
has to do is copy them from /usr/portage to the overlay. You shouldn't
even need to mess with CVS, as soon as you mask all newer versions of a
package, you should copy its ebuild directory to your overlay to keep it
safe. Old versions do not disappear as soon as a newer version comes out,
unless the previous version had a serious security hole.

mkdir -p /usr/local/portage/category
cp -a /usr/portage/category/package /usr/local/portage/category

How hard is that?


-- 
Neil Bothwick

If everything is coming your way then you're in the wrong lane.