Rich Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > Keep in mind that keeping track of past decisions made by portage does > not require user-editable config files in /etc.
Yes, but you might not always agree with portage's decisions, and the resolution might be non-unique. Although the user might always influence it with /etc/portage/package.use it might be better to keep this transparent to the user - therefore, I suggested a directory in /etc and not in /var (Moreover, a cache would not make sense, since the previous decision could always be trivially calculated from /var/db/pkg, and the user-selected state of the USE-flag for the corresponding package. You could not check the validity of such a cache, since you cannot check whether USE or /etc/portage/package.use has changed) > That said, portage still has to spend time basically re-validating the > consistency of the entire system *Validating* consistency is not time-consuming. Looking for possibilities to unset use-flags is a much more time-consuming story. If everything is consistent or can easily be resolved, you hardly need any backtracking...
