On Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:20:03 +0100, Willie Wong wrote about Re:
[gentoo-user] what's wrong with rsync 3.0.6?:

>On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 05:08:06PM +0000, David W Noon wrote:
[snip]
>> Because emerge jobs produce copious amounts of output that is
>> difficult to read as it scrolls past.  I much prefer the cron daemon
>> or at daemon to send me the output as email, so I can scroll
>> backwards and forwards through it at my leisure.
>
>What output do you actually read from syncs?

I look at the differences in the Portage tree before and after.

>For builds, is it really wise to do all updates unattended?

Perfectly.  The emerge runs the same whether in background or
foreground.  If it's going to trash something, it will do it the same
way whether you use an "at" job or run it directly in the console.

> Also, for builds, there is such a
>thing as elogs (which allows you to save all messages to 
>/var/log/portage for ease of reading at your leisure.

I have mine go to /var/log/portage/log.  But these only log the
activities within a single ebuild, not the other housekeeping that goes
on in an emerge job.  The output of a batch job contains the lot.

>I'm sure you have a good reason for wanting to do things your way, and
>I do not claim mine is better. I am just surprised that you sounded
>surprised to find out some people don't do things your way.

Perhaps it is because I became used to running long-winded jobs in the
background years ago on mainframes.  It was always the case that using
the terminal as the primary output device slowed down the job, because
spooling the output to disk was always faster than displaying it on the
terminal.  I believe that to be so to this very day.

>Actually, the cron daemon won't run because I don't have a cron daemon
>installed on the laptop. And I don't have a cron daemon because having
>periodic jobs only make sense if the computer is likely to be on when
>cron is triggered. 

Using a modern cron daemon is a convenient way to run regular jobs,
even on a machine that is powered off for much of the time.  One can
use the "first" option to kick off jobs relative to power-on time
instead of wall clock time.
-- 
Regards,

Dave  [RLU #314465]
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dwnoon@ntlworld.com (David W Noon)
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