Re: [gentoo-user] world favorites: pros and cons

["Richard Fish" <bigfish@asmallpond.org>]

On 7/5/06, Daniel Iliev <danny@ilievnet.com> wrote:
> That is correct. What are the disadvantages besides the longer seeks for
> updates?

Another disadvantage is that you defeat a big reason for having USE
flags.  For example, if you merge pkg A that USEs X to depend on pkg
B, and you have X in your USE flag, the A will depend on B and pull it
in as a dependancy.

If you later take X out of your use flags, and do an emerge -DNuv
world, the A no longer depends on B.  But since it is still in your
world file, portage will assume you want this package, and continue to
compile updates for it with each new version.  That can be a pretty
huge waste of time.

> I have no problem with the redundant cruft - when I want just to try
> some package I do "emerge --pretend" and record the list of dependencies
> it wants to pull-in. If I decide the package is not useful to me, I
> "un-emerge" not only the package, but also the dependencies it had
> pulled-in during its installation.

You're going through a lot of work to circumvent the dependancy
tracking that is already built into portage.  Why not just merge the
top-level package, and if you don't like it, unmerge and use
--depclean --pretend to figure out what can safely be removed?

And I don't necessarily believe that having everything in world
results in a significantly faster scan time than having only top-level
packages there.  I would like to see actual proof of this assertion.

-Richard
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