On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 2:53 PM, Christoph Mende <ange...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > I believe it's /var/lib/<name>. Here's what FHS says: > /var/cache is intended for cached data from applications. Such data is > locally generated as a result of time-consuming I/O or calculation. > The application must be able to regenerate or restore the data. Unlike > /var/spool, the cached files can be deleted without data loss. >
I can do rm -rf /usr/portage ; mkdir /usr/portage ; emerge --sync and it will work just fine, I think. That really does point to cache. The only thing different from a browser cache is that portage doesn't automatically refresh it. distfiles and packages are the same (well, depending on where you get your binpackages from, that might or might not be a cache per-se - if you're just using FEATURES=buildpkg then you can do an emerge -e world and get it back). > And: > /var/lib/<name> is the location that must be used for all distribution > packaging support. > I think that things like the local list of installed packages belongs in this category. It is a bit debatable how the tree fits into this. However, this really is bikeshedding. Sure, /usr isn't ideal, but unless we actually start supporting some use case where it doesn't work so well in the future, I doubt we'll ever see it move. Plus, there is even a case for keeping it in /usr in the Fedora-envisioned /usr-is-ro world. You could have a complete installation and a portage tree that it was generated from all snapshotted there. Sure, maybe /usr/lib or /usr/share might make more sense then, but again, I don't see it changing unless it actually results in a real benefit to users. Rich
