[gentoo-amd64] Re: Interrupting portage gracefully

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Peter Humphrey <prh@gotadsl.co.uk> posted
200611231821.13640.prh@gotadsl.co.uk, excerpted below, on  Thu, 23 Nov
2006 18:21:13 +0000:

> Does anyone here know of a signal I can pass to portage to make it stop at 
> the end of the current package? Quite often I find I'm emerging quite a lot 
> of packages, and I'd like to shut the machine down for the night and resume 
> in the morning. (I have been running it all night, but it's getting to be a 
> bit noisy in the fan department.)

I don't believe there's a way to do it other than manually (watching for
the right moment and stopping it then), but using the --resume switch will
resume it at the same package, and if you use FEATURES=ccache and have it
setup correctly, the compile to the point of interruption will have been
cached so that package should merge faster, as well.  It'll still take
awhile as the configure steps repeat, and the linking and other
non-compile steps repeat as well, but the actual compilation should be
cached, so that part will be faster, on the package it's doing twice.

Of course, there are some I'd still not want to interrupt.  a gcc compile,
or glibc, come to mind, as does kdelibs if you have it merged, and from
what I read, openoffice, unless they are just barely started.  However, an
emerge --pretend or --ask can give you an idea of if and where they are in
the list, and you can schedule accordingly.

Alternatively, do a pretend, to get a list, and then emerge individual
packages.  I often do this with --tree, to get an idea of the
dependencies, and then do several merges in parallel (such that there
aren't any conflicting dependencies, thus the --tree), since portage
otherwise doesn't make very efficient use of multiple CPUs for much of the
emerge run.  The configure step for instance is generally single-job
serial, as are most of the other steps other than the actual compile. 
Even the compile is often forced to -j1 for individual packages due to job
ordering issues if -jX were allowed, so the /only/ way I've found to
efficiently make use of even TWO-way SMP is to invoke up to five emerges
in parallel.  The problem will be even worse once I upgrade to dual-core
Opteron 285s, thus four-way SMP (I see prices are down to $1200-ish for
the pair, now).

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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