Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo healthy?

[Alan McKinnon <alan@linuxholdings.co.za>]

On Thursday 21 December 2006 23:28, Benno Schulenberg wrote:


> But he can't: the ebuild is gone.  That is the case we're trying to
> solve here: he has emerged a newer version of a package, finds it
> doesn't work correctly, wants to go back to the previous version,
> but seess that that version is gone.  How to get it back?  One way
> is to get it from viewcvs on the net.  Another way is to keep a copy
> of all the ebuilds yourself.  It's a big waste of space, but it is
> simple, no searching on the web required.
>
> The best way, of course, is to use the binary package thing.  Mark:
> add EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="-b" to your /etc/make.conf.  This will
> tell emerge to also build a binary package for every package that
> you emerge.  Whenever you find that an upgrade of some package was
> unfortunate, do an  'emerge  -K  =package-x.y.z'  with the exact
> version number you want to restore, and done.  No manual tarring
> and untarring required, emerge does it all.

I can't believe you are advocating either of those solutions. It means 
you retain 500M worth of tgz'ed portage tree for just in case an ebuild 
leaves the tree. Any custom changes you make to the tree are wiped out 
with the next --sync anyway, so now the user has to remember which ones 
were updated and remember to put them all back.

A bin package is equally cumbersome. You will very quickly consume huge 
amounts of disk space - at least equal to all the current packages on 
the system plus old ones that were updated. With an average notebook 
40G drive, that's 40% of your disk space gone right there. And the user 
still has to remember which packages are the customized ones.

Trust me, the portage devs have already figured all this out and 
overlays are exactly the solution for this. The user already has to be 
online to have updated, so all he needs do is get the desired ebuild 
from cvs, copy it to /usr/local/portage, block updates to that package 
using package.mask and then GO AWAY AND FORGET ALL ABOUT IT. No more 
maintenance, no monthly tars, no vast amounts of disk space consumed. 
it all just works.

Tell me, have you ever actually used overlays? 

alan

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