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

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

On 7/5/06, Daniel Iliev <danny@ilievnet.com> wrote:
> Then what is the purpose of:
> "emerge --update world" w/o "--deep"?

To update only the packages in world, without updating dependancies.
As I think I mentioned, some people do not like using --deep, because
they don't necessarily want to update all libraries to the latest
available version for fear of introducing instability/bugs into their
systems.  So they *may* want to update to the latest firefox, but that
doesn't mean they want the latest gtk+ libraries as well.  Presumably
they also monitor the GLSA channels to make sure they don't miss
important security updates...

> Well, this means that one has to manually handle things as well as in
> the way I deal with packages, right? ;-)

Well, yes, but only for the few things that you really care about, not
the entire system.  And why --depclean should always be run with
--pretend first.

> Compared to it, the router checks for updates about 2 times faster.
> I can't be precise, but if you insist I could do a "time emerge -pvuDN
> world" on both of them and send the results.

Ok, but that is for two completely different systems with different
sets of packages installed.  It doesn't tell us whether the time is a
function of the total number of packages that are installed, or the
number of things listed in world.  The question is, if your athlon
didn't have any dependancies in world, would the update check run
faster or slower?  I don't _actually_ care about the answer, I'm just
pointing out that comparing the performance of systems with different
sets of packages installed isn't a good way to test how the
performance of portage relates to the size of the world file.

-Richard
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