Re: [gentoo-user] Open Question: The feasibility of a complete portage binhost

[Alec Ten Harmsel]

I actually had kind of a cool idea while walking to the bus stop this
morning; a JIT Portage server that builds packages on demand. This would
require:

* Writing a portage server
* Patching portage to connect to said server

Basically, `emerge <pkgname>` would send a message to the server "I need
www-client/firefox-35.0[pulseaudio]". The server would return the
tarball if already built, otherwise build it and then return it. This
would be reasonably complex to implement in practice, but it would let
everybody using the same binhost to run their own custom USE flags.

Re more accurate numbers: dev-java/icedtea. Let's pretend building this
takes ~5 minutes (this is faster than my desktop can do it in RAM with 6
hyper-threaded cores). There are 13 USE flags that are configurable if
you're using HotSpot; we'll ignore JamVM and CACAO. On a single server,
this would take nearly a month (28.44 days, exactly).

Alec