Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo healthy?

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

On Friday 22 December 2006 11:06, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Dec 2006 09:16:10 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Except it's not 500MB, as you'll see by looking at the snapshots
> directory on any Gentoo mirror. Of course, the fact that portage
> trees for the last couple of weeks are nicely tarred up on all the
> Gentoo mirrors makes this process pointless anyway :)

My /usr/portage (without distfiles) is 558,560 blocks of 1k each. I have 
no idea what it will .tar.gz down to

[snip]

> > 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.
>
> Absolutely. Overlays are there specifically for people who need
> something different from the standard portage tree. They are hardly
> difficult to use, as long as you know how to use mkdir and cp. When a
> user has a system that depends on specific versions of particular
> packages, all he has to do is copy them from /usr/portage to the
> overlay. You shouldn't even need to mess with CVS, as soon as you
> mask all newer versions of a package, you should copy its ebuild
> directory to your overlay to keep it safe. Old versions do not
> disappear as soon as a newer version comes out, unless the previous
> version had a serious security hole.
>
> mkdir -p /usr/local/portage/category
> cp -a /usr/portage/category/package /usr/local/portage/category
>
> How hard is that?

We agree on this. I use overlays extensively:

alan@nazgul /usr/portage/virtual/perl-DB_File $ ll /usr/local/portage/
total 21
drwxrwsr-x 27 root portage  880 Dec 10 12:02 ./
drwxr-xr-x 11 root root     312 Sep 24 20:19 ../
drwxrwsr-x  3 root portage   72 Nov 11 18:08 app-admin/
drwxrwsr-x  3 root portage   72 Nov 11 18:09 app-editors/
drwxrwsr-x  3 root portage   72 Nov 11 18:09 app-laptop/
drwxrwsr-x  5 root portage  120 Dec  9 20:19 app-misc/
drwxrwsr-x  3 root portage   72 Dec 10 11:30 app-text/
drwxrwsr-x  3 root portage   72 Nov 11 18:10 dev-db/
drwxrwsr-x  6 root portage  144 Nov 11 18:11 dev-libs/
drwxrwsr-x  4 root portage   96 Nov 11 18:11 dev-util/
drwxrwsr-x  2 root portage   48 Nov 11 18:56 distfiles/
drwxrwsr-x  2 root portage   48 Nov 11 18:56 eclass/
-rw-rw-r--  1 root portage  121 Jan  2  2006 header.txt
drwxrwsr-x  3 root portage   72 Nov 11 18:11 mail-client/
drwxrwsr-x  9 root portage  224 Dec  3 10:48 media-gfx/
drwxrwsr-x  8 root portage  200 Dec  9 20:45 media-libs/
drwxrwsr-x  3 root portage   72 Dec  9 20:45 media-sound/
drwxrwsr-x  5 root portage  120 Nov 11 22:26 media-video/
drwxrwsr-x  3 root portage   72 Nov 11 18:15 net-im/
drwxrwsr-x  2 root portage  168 Dec 17 19:59 profiles/
drwxrwsr-x  3 root portage   72 Nov 11 18:16 sci-calculators/
-rw-rw-r--  1 root portage 3666 Jan  2  2006 skel.ChangeLog
-rw-rw-r--  1 root root    7189 Sep 22 17:05 skel.ebuild
-rw-rw-r--  1 root portage  789 Jun  8  2004 skel.metadata.xml
drwxrwsr-x  3 root portage   72 Nov 11 18:17 sys-fs/
drwxrwsr-x  3 root portage   72 Nov 11 18:17 x11-apps/
drwxrwsr-x  8 root portage  192 Dec  9 20:37 x11-libs/
drwxrwsr-x 10 root portage  264 Dec 10 12:44 x11-misc/
drwxrwsr-x 25 root portage  712 Dec  9 23:17 x11-plugins/
drwxrwsr-x  4 root portage  104 Nov 11 18:19 x11-terms/
drwxrwsr-x  4 root portage  104 Dec 10 11:36 x11-wm/

alan
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