Two patches which allow a user to bypass files created with doman and dodoc in FEATURES:
FEATURES="noman nodoc" emerge -av foo http://jawed.name/dev/gentoo/nodoc.patch http://jawed.name/dev/gentoo/noman.patch Quick background/inspiration: I found myself having to make an initrd suitable to do PXE boots for our business and educational clusters. I was exploiting the ever so useful ROOT option for portage to emerge packages into the initrd build directory. However, because this was an initrd being sent over the network, total size was important. At larger sizes the loading the initrd would actually cause a kernel panic on pivoting root...whether this was a result of a kernel config, a set maximum size limit, or something else I'm not exactly sure of. Looking at the output of du, I started first by removing the man and documentation files. This brought the size of my final initrd down significantly (~287MiB to ~242MiB). Possible issues/bigger picture: While I was making the changes to doman and prepman, I kept thinking of how this really is part of a bigger picture, [I think] maybe the whole minimal concept should be abstracted out of USE (for packages that have it) and be part of FEATURES (for all packages). In my case because I was using ROOT in portage to build out an initrd, I didn't really need or want man or documentation for the packages I was putting in. At the end of the day, maybe there should be a specific mix of FEATURES such as "nodoc noman" and/or a granular mix of "minimal" which encompasses the previous+more. Obviously it's open for a lot of discussion and the patches attached should/would probably not be a final solution...the goal was that this would be a start. We've been using this patch and it's worked out for us well. Your mileage may vary, if it does, please say something! :-) Thanks, John PS Sorry to the devs I was working with (you know who you are :-) for my inactivity lately...moving my life 1600 miles on a weeks' notice hasn't exactly been the easiest thing, definitely hasn't helped for the free time column. -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list