Re: [gentoo-dev] Managing updates on many identical Gentoo systems

[Zac Medico <zmedico@gentoo.org>]

On 01/18/2018 08:13 AM, Alec Warner wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 6:46 AM, Anthony G. Basile <blueness@gentoo.org
> <mailto:blueness@gentoo.org>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi everyone,
> 
>     I'm trying to design an update system for many identical Gentoo systems.
>      Using a binhost is obvious, but there are still problems with this
>     approach.
> 
>     Unless there's some magic I don't know about (and this is why I'm
>     sending this email) each machine still needs to have the portage tree
>     installed locally (1.5 GB) or somehow mounted by a network filesystem
>     (which is not practical if the machines are not on a local network).
> 
> 
> +Zac
> 
> I don't believe this is true; with the correct binhost configuration
> portage should:
> 
> 1) Contact the binhost to get a dump of packages available on it.
> 2) Use that dump to create a 'virtual portage tree' (bindb).
> 3) Use the bindb for package discovery (is foo available) and dependency
> calculation.

It's already possible if you use PORTAGE_BINHOST and create a dummy
profile to satisfy portage. I've filed this bug to create a convenient
option for this:

https://bugs.gentoo.org/644990

> 
>     Furthermore, each machine would have to run emerge locally to do the
>     calculation of what packages need updating.
> 
> 
> The good news is that with a bindb; the package tree itself is much
> smaller. ::gentoo is 23000 packages.
> But you bindb is only as large as you build binpkgs for and publish
> them. So say stage3 + some other stuff.
> Around 500 packages perhaps.

Doing the calculation on the client side is fine, since binary package
calculations are much simpler than source-based ebuild calculations.
-- 
Thanks,
Zac