Re: [gentoo-dev] Idea for the portage maintainers

[Tom St Denis <tom@securescience.net>]

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On April 12, 2004 06:45 am, Alexander Gretencord wrote:
> On Sunday 11 April 2004 13:55, Tom St Denis wrote:
> > I think a cool function [which I didn't see in the latest portage
> > release] is a "snapshot" and restore set of functionality.  e.g. you can
> > snapshot the current install set and later restore (by adding/removing
> > packages) as required.
>
> What exactly do you mean by that? What irritates me is that "by
> adding/removing packages". If you just want a list of all installed
> packages you can already get it. What I'd understand by snapshotting is
> really packaging a set of packages and their deps. Kind of a '-b' but after
> merging.

Well Ideally a command that simply emits a list of installed packages is what 
I'm talking about.  But specifically, it emits the list [and say GZIPs it at 
the same time] into a db of "restore points".  

So as another poster said I could do say 

emerge restore "11/04/04"

If I installed something today that I didn't like.  The trick is to make this 
painless for the user so the user won't scream in horror and go install 
Windows.

> > Also any plans to optimize the portage files?  80k small files amounts to
> > huge waste of space.
>
> Depends on your filesystem. With certain filesystems you could adjust the
> blocksize for /usr/portage/ to a smaller value (with a larger value
> for /usr/portage/distfiles of course) or use reiserfs with tail packing on.

Oh, ok so I'll just format my disk, reinstall Gentoo from scratch so that I 
can not waste 200M of space on 80k small files.

That's not really user friendly.  Could have done a JAR like setup for each 
dir of the tree.  e.g. all of app-text be one huge ZIP file [with no 
compression].  Such a setup might be a little slower to add/remove files but 
would waste less space.

The idea would make a little sense though in practice.  When I do "emerge 
sync" instead of fetching 1000s of small files I just check the timestamp on 
the directory zips and download them wholesale.  [Ok so maybe compression 
makes sense here].

That way as a user I don't have to worry about inserting/deleting files from a 
zip [which would take a while] only the server has todo it.  In fact the 
server could still use the "many files" approach and just zip on the fly when 
a user syncs.

I know that would make things a bit more complicated since mirrors update via 
"sync" as well.  I guess you could just have two types of portage trees.  
e.g. "packaged" and "straight" or something like that.  End users would use 
the "packaged" type [e.g. zip per category] and mirrors would use straight 
[e.g. all 80k files].

Anyways, I'm just throwing out ideas here.  Using the zip approach makes sense 
for end users.  First, it makes for faster syncing [less smaller files means 
fewer metadata commands] and wastes much less space [and would be faster 
since the kernel could cache it quicker!].

Tom
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