-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Zac Medico wrote: > Emma Strubell wrote: >> And to clarify: the goal of the project is to modify portage so that >> instead of fetching all of the ebuilds in the portage tree (or in an >> overlay) upon a sync, portage only fetches the metadata and cache info >> (via the metadata/cache/ directory) of the tree, and the ebuilds of >> packages that are already installed (packages found in the world >> file?) And then, additional ebuilds would be fetched only when they >> are needed? > > The problem with fetching the ebuilds separately is that the remote > repository might have changed. So, it's not a very reliable approach > unless there is some kind of guarantee that the remote repository > will provide a window of time during which older ebuilds that have > already been removed from the main tree can still be downloaded. In > order to accomplish this, you'd essentially have to devise a new > source package format which can be downloaded as a single file > (something like a source rpm file that an rpm based distro would > provide).
Expanding on this a bit... if you were going to pack an ebuild into a single file, you would need to include the eclasses which it inherits and also any patches that are included with it in cvs. If the eclasses are included in this way, each source package will contain a redundant copy of the inherited eclasses. Despite this redundancy, you might still have a net decrease in bandwidth usage since you'd only have to download the source packages that you actually want to build. If you are going to implement something like this, I imagine that you'd create a tool which would pack an ebuild into a source package and optionally sign it with a digital signature. Source packages would be uploaded to a server which would serve them along with a metadata cache file that clients would download for use in dependency calculations (similar to how $PKGDIR/Packages is currently used for binary packages). - -- Thanks, Zac -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.11 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAknUT0oACgkQ/ejvha5XGaPmugCfVs0I4a15trwTgLnPwBac2xOj wI0AoInp1Jf6yaYV5rNvU2EXHbZ30AkS =tNrz -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
