Re: [gentoo-dev] New feature proposition (make.conf)

[Stewart Honsberger <blkdeath@gentoo.org>]

Zack Gilburd wrote:

> One of the problems that plagues Gentoo is that the distro's growth is leading 
> to an insane amount of distfiles downloads (and even excessive downloads) 
> along with excessive rsync'ing.  Automatic removal of distfiles would 
> substancially increase the amount of distfiles downloads due to the fact that 
> packages often have revisions made to them and revisions mean that the 
> software has to be recompiled -- thus the distfile would have to be 
> redownloaded of already removed.
> 
> Until the general downloading (and rsyncing) etiqutte improves, I don't see 
> how this could be The Right Thing(TM) to do.

I've been thinking along the lines of a cronjob being pulled in with, 
say, Portage. Said cron job would, on a daily/weekly basis remove old 
distfiles based upon age, and perhaps even have a setting to consider 
size. (Eg; always/never remove files greater/less than a certain size).

That's where it gets tricky. OpenOffice, Mozilla et al. are two great 
examples of packages whose source tarballs are *LARGE*. On one hand, 
those would, in one fell swoop, free up the most HDD space = most 
benefeit. On the other hand, they'd also cost more bandwidth to 
re-download = most detrimental.

Operating on a strictly age-based system based around file access time 
could potentially work, except that Gentoo's install defaults and/or 
suggests strongly the notion of 'noatime' in fstab entries.

The script for the cronjob is easy, especially if it's only date-based. 
The politics involved in implementing it, however, could be hairy. I'll 
throw my script out there for review if it interests anybody and let 
someone who's more proficient in Bash scripting add in the filesize details.

-- 
Stewart Honsberger
http://blackdeath.snerk.org/
"Capitalists, by nature, organize to protect themselves.
-- Geeks, by nature, resist organizaion."


--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list