[gentoo-user] Re: eix-sync data comparison

[eroen]

On Sat, 11 Jan 2014 21:44:19 +0100, meino.cramer@×××.de wrote:
> > On 11/01/2014 22:04, meino.cramer@×××.de wrote:

> > > suppose I would do an eix-sync on two different computers of
> > > different platforms -- say AMR and an ordinary PC.
Sharing a portage tree (the files in /usr/portage) is perfectly safe,
as this is identical for basic gentoo systems (prefix and similar
are ...different. Best not go there ;-).

However, the eix database is not portable between different systems.
I do not have an exhaustive list of what settings cause
incompatibility, but at least different ARCH (amd64 or arm) will cause
issues since different packages are available to each.

> Especially with the ARM I need to sync once a day, since I have to
> limit the amount of software to be recompiled/updated after each sync
> since the ARM is not *that* fast (for example a kernel compilation
> take ~8h).
While that is not strictly enforced, I myself run an rsync server
locally, mostly to ensure that different systems have identical trees,
thus preserving my sanity.

Instructions for setting up a local rsync server can be found here:
  https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Infrastructure/Rsync
To make a client (the arm box) sync from the local server, just change
the sync-uri variable in /etc/portage/repos.conf/gentoo.conf and the
SYNC variable (if present) in make.conf .

You could even share a portage tree over nfs or similar, which I
sometimes do for VMs. Depending on your (networking and storage)
hardware, that might even work out favourably performance-wise. You
could also generate a squashfs image on the desktop and transfer that to
and mount it on the arm box (over http or something using a short
shell script), if, say, the arm box is limited on storage space. A
squashfs of the gentoo tree is about 70MB.

-- 
eroen