Re: [gentoo-user] a question about updating process

[thegeezer <thegeezer@thegeezer.net>]

On 29/07/14 12:00, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 6:52 AM, behrouz khosravi <bz.khosravi@gmail.com> wrote:
>> well chromium was just an example. I just think that when there is a version
>> upgrade, a patch should be enough.
> For things like backports you're fairly likely to only get a patch.
> However, for an upstream version change (which chromium seems to have
> every other week) you're probably going to get a full tarball.
>
>> I have read that portage is migrating to git, but I guess I got it wrong,
>> because I thought that the source codes will be maintained using git too.
>> However why not? why not use git for source maintenance too?
> Portage probably will migrate to git at some point, but when it does
> you'll probably not notice a thing.
>
> Gentoo doesn't maintain the source to chromium - upstream does.  In
> some cases Gentoo doesn't even redistribute the source (licensing
> issues).  For chromium Google publishes a tarball on googleapis.com
> and Gentoo mirrors it.
>
> There has been talk about creating some kind of source repository for
> things like patches/etc, but that isn't going to really change when we
> distribute patches vs upstream tarballs.  Generally speaking upstream
> tarballs are preferred over patches to keep things simple.  With what
> we do now you know you're basically getting chromium as upstream
> distributes it.  If we were to just mirror chrome-25 and 300 binary
> diffs to patch it up to the current version nobody could keep track of
> it all, and while you'd save some space on each upgrade your first
> install might involve downloading 10GB of diffs unless we went even
> further and had a variety of full vs incremental files.  This has been
> discussed in terms of having portage on squashfs and just doing it for
> our own stuff looks to be fairly painful, let alone doing it for every
> upstream out there.
>
> Rich
>
The big issue I see in doing this would be that if you for example don't
have libreoffice or something then you would need to download the source
and the patches and then crucially keep a copy everywhere so that it can
be patched in the future.   the way it works currently portage fetches
from a suitable mirror everything it needs and then cleans up after
itself, so /usr/portage remains of a certain size.

if we were all to download all sources and then have portage only fetch
diffs then we would all need to have an equivalent of a full slakware
DVD kit on hand which starts getting very unruly very easily - even if
we only wanted a minimal gentoo with iproute2.

to save yourself the downloads you might want to look into setting up
your own PORTAGE_BINHOST that you can redistribute from, but be wary
that different devices may require different compile options, so you can
sacrifice speed for compatibility by using more generic makeoptions

hth