Re: [gentoo-dev] The uncertain future of repository mirrors

[Tim Harder <radhermit@gentoo.org>]

On 2025-03-30 Sun 02:11, Michael Mair-Keimberger wrote:
>I guess i'm a bit late in this discussion but i wanted to let you know 
>this would also affect my gentoo qa scripts. 
>(https://gentooqa.levelnine.at). Right now i'm checking the gentoo, 
>guru, kde, science and pentoo repositories, syncing the repos from 
>gentoo-mirror for the pre-created metadata.
>While the gentoo repository is probably the most valuable, kde, 
>science and pentoo checks would be non functional and i probably would 
>have to remove them. (at least until i update my script to create the 
>metadata myself..)

Just to point out, generating metadata can be relatively quick these
days for large repos using non-portage tools. Anyone using egencache or
`emerge --regen` from portage (especially for new repos without any
metadata) is wasting a lot of CPU cycles and memory mainly due to
portage's inefficient design executing a new instance of bash per
ebuild.

Alternatives would be `pmaint regen` from pkgcore (roughly 4x faster
than portage) and `pk repo metadata regen` from pkgcraft-tools (roughly
10x faster than portage while using 10x less memory than pkgcore). On
semi-decent desktop hardware a full gentoo repo metadata run using
pkgcraft takes ~10-20 seconds and less than a second for full
verification only. For those interested in more design discussion and
benchmarks see [1].

Tim

[1]: https://pkgcraft.github.io/posts/metadata-cache-generation/