Re: [gentoo-user] how to control portage space usage

[motub@planet.nl]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Fernando Meira <fmeira@gmail.com> 
Date: Sunday, August 7, 2005 10:22 pm 
Subject: [gentoo-user] how to control portage space usage 
 
> Hi, 
> this is probably an old discussion, sorry for bring it up again. 
>  
> When I joined Gentoo (a few months ago) I got the idea that I could  
> control  
> very well the space that gentoo would require. That would be great  
> because  
> of my 4.6G available to it. Then, not so long time ago I got very  
> surprised  
> with how much less space available I had when I didn't have  
> (almost)  
> anything installed. Now it's completely full and I'm the middle of  
> an emerge  
> :( 
>  
> Well, tears apart, I would like to know if there's a good way to  
> control the  
> space usage of portage, since it is the reason for my problem.  
> My /usr/portage and /var/tmp/portage/ take 2.2G which is almost  
> half of the  
> partition. 
>  
> What I have installed: 
> - some (split) ebuilds of kde 3.4.1 
> - e16 
> - e17 
> - firefox 
> - gimp 
> - acrobat reader 7 
> - xmms, amsn (and maybe a few more small packages) 
>  
> What I've found until now: 
> - clear /usr/portage/distfiles and /var/tmp/portage after an  
> emerge, or  
> regularly (using tmpreaper) 
> - there are some users-made scripts (still buggy) that look for old  
> ebuilds  
> in portage tree and erases them ( 
> http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-3011-highlight- 
> portage+space+usage.html) 
>  
> Any comments/ideas/scripts about this, or everyone has plenty space  
> to  
> spare... 
>  
> Cheers, 
> Fernando 
 
As far as I know, that's pretty much what you can do (assuming that the cleaning of /var/tmp/portage occurs when you have a failed emerge 
as well, since failed emerges leave the temporary work files there until the emerge is either correctly completed, or you delete the files 
yourself). 
 
The thing is, it now depends to some degree on just what you are emerging, because as you fill your disk with emerged programs, and 
assuming that those programs don't reside on another disk (/usr, /var, /tmp, or /opt on another disk or partition than / ), you will lose 
the ability to compile certain programs that naturally take up more space than you have available during the emerge process. 
 
I'm thinking specifically of OpenOffice.org, which takes about 3GB just to emerge, but I suspect Mozilla and its ilk, and certain KDE 
programs may not be much better. Not to mention X.org or glibc. But from what you've said, even if /usr/portage/distfiles 
and /var/tmp/portage are empty, you wouldn't have enough space to emerge OO.o at this time, and possibly other high-end programs as well. 
Of course, you could just use the openoffice-bin package for that case. But not for every case that this might occur, and frankly, it's a 
losing proposition (either you have to be constantly on the ball as to how much space every program you want needs to emerge, or you have 
to give up some stuff). 
 
Less than 5GB is really not enough for a Gentoo install unless it's going to be *very* minimal. If I was you, I'd look around for an old 5 
or 10 GB disk, slap it in the box and move /usr or /var (probably a better choice) to that, and then mount it to the / partition. 
 
Just my 0.02 
Holly 
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