On 19/12/2012 14:43, Ulrich Mueller wrote: > Why? The portage tree is of central importance for Gentoo, so IMHO a > second-level directory would be acceptable for it. Besides, it > currently is in /usr/portage, so it wouldn't be new but would only > move from /usr to /var.
I'm irked enough by /usr/portage that using that as a reason is just going to make me feel even more strongly that it should not be /var/portage. > I don't understand how this is related to the discussion. None of the > above have any relevance for Gentoo that would be comparable to > Portage. See above. > This doesn't mean that /var/portage is the only possible choice. But > IMHO it's better than some of the other suggestions that I've seen > here, like /var/cache/portage/repositories/gentoo/tree and so on. I'm not arguing that it should go 5 levels deep. But two or three deep is fine for me. Is it going to be /var/db/portage/master ? Fine. Is it going to be /var/cache/portage/tree? Fine. /var/cache/portage + /var/cache/distfiles ? Fine. Just mv /usr/portage /var/portage ? FFS no. Among other things, as many said before, we should really take distfiles out of the tree itself, and packages the same. And I don't want /var/packages or /var/distfiles at all. >> /var/portage ? I have to look it up manually. > > Please, stay serious. ;-) I am serious. If it's my first time backing up a system, and I encounter a directory "/var/portage", it doesn't make it clear what it contains. Is it re-generable? Should it be backed up entirely? That's why my suggestion is to use /var/cache: it makes it clear that there is no definitive reason to back it up (as Justin said there is an issue with distfiles you can't re-download but that's a different story I'd say — maybe setting a default read-only distdir for said packages might make sense, but I don't want to get there at all). Also, I usually keep /var/cache in a more "unsafe" disk — I don't care if I lose cache because the drive dies, while /var/lib is fully backed up. I don't usually split /var/db but I can see what people were saying about having different allocation requirements for the tree compared to distfiles, and I guess that if we put the tree there we could gain something even for /var/db/pkg by splitting it. Tree hierarchies are there to make things more easily organized, not just to look nice. -- Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes flamee...@flameeyes.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/
