Hi there, 

I installed GENTOO yeserday and I must say:

I LIKE IT.

Just some observations though:

when emerging my way from stage 1 to three, I noticed that the emerge
does a lot of stuff serially. It first tries to find out a lot of stuff, then downloads the package, then compiles and then checks. These stages have to wait for
each other to complete. 

Would it be an idea to run these tasks parallelly like:

emerge.findout|emerge.download|emerge.build|emerge.check_and_log;

the processes could pass an xml job describing structure like :
job
  package
    file
      downloaded_ok
      compiled_ok
      installed_ok
      various messages and flags
    /file
  /packaeg
/job. 

this way downloading, checking and building are done in parrallel.
Extra advantage: the logging process has all relevant status
info at hand and can draw intelligent conclusions as to what went
wrong. 

It's just a thought; looking at the emerge script, I couldn's find
obvious points for cutting it in four. I noticed that messages are
writen to stderr, so piping stdouts to stdins should be no problem. 

Any thoughts on it? 

cheers, 

cobus
-- 
_______________________________________________
Find what you are looking for with the Lycos Yellow Pages
http://r.lycos.com/r/yp_emailfooter/http://yellowpages.lycos.com/default.asp?SRC=lycos10