[ale] Gentoo

[Charles Marcus]

> From: Joe at orado.localdomain.private
> Sent: Monday, August 19, 2002 12:14 PM
>
> Hi folks,
>
> Interestingly, about 30% of the disk usage
> is in /usr/portage, where we keep copies of all the
> source tarballs used to build the system. That seems
> unnecessary to me (though I guess it would be an
> advantage if you were on a slow net link).

Yes, there is a lot of stuff you can delete once you have gotten the system
installed, but you'll have to re d/l anything if you have to reinstall for
some reason.

> I did have one problem. I tend to use VNC heavily, so
> I did an "emerge vnc", which died during the build of
> vncviewer: "No rule to make target vncviewer.man, needed
> by vncviewer._man." I correctly surmised that if I
> simply touched /var/tmp/portage/.../vncviewer/vncviewer.man,
> the build would complete successfully (and install a
> bogus empty manpage, but who cares). I found it
> quite difficult to actually accomplish that, however,
> since emerge insists on blowing away the working
> source tree each time, rather than using the
> existing source that I, er, "fixed." What I
> ended up doing was:
>
> emerge vnc
> ...wait for source code to be unpacked...
> ^Z
> touch /var/tmp/portage/.../vncviewer.man
> fg
>
> After which the build completed successfully.
>
> The emerge docs don't seem to indicate a way of
> forcing emerge to use the existing source tree,
> if any. It seems to me this would be a very
> useful feature.
>
> Cheers,
>
> -- Joe

Hey Joe,

Please submit ebuild bugs to http://bugs.gentoo.org/ - this sounds like one,
and I didn't see it listed (you have to register to submit bugs, but if you
are gonna use Gentoo, why not?)...

As I have said, Portage is still quite young - please feel free to go add an
issue (be sure to search and see if your issue is already in there) for any
improvements you can think of.  I will say, most of them (can't speak to
this specific one) are probably already in there - or there is already a way
to do it.

Definitely print out an 'emerge --help', and read all of the Portage and USE
docs.  One problem, though, is stuff changes so fast that the docs are
usually a bit behind.  Definitely do an 'emerge --help' after every Portage
update (seems to update once or more a week, if not daily sometimes).

Charles


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