Hello People, I have been playing with binary packages in portage for a week or so now, I have a laptop that takes AGES to do compiles. I've tryed a number of other approaches (distcc, nfs portage ect) but binary packages seem to work the best for my situation. However there don't appear to be any docs on this subject, indeed even some of the flags that portage uses (like -g) for binary packages do not even appear to be in the man pages. This makes the whole process a *bit* confusing. So if there are any people out there who deal with binary packages alot... please can you help me out with the following questions.....
What and how is metadata stored in binary packages? I read about the metadata all the time.... but I'm not sure what it actually consists of. I would guess the USE flags and gcc options that were used to make the package..... but I really would like to find out for sure. I'm fairly sure if I understood that a number fo the below questions would answer them selfs. Should -K require binpackages for all dependancys? I *have* read the docs here. I can understand some of the rational. However if I have packages B and C installed.... and I want to install package A, with -K..... not only do I have to have a binary for package A, but I also have to have binarys for B and C too. This seems odd to me, I was expecting that -K would require that all unmerged packages and unmerged dependancys would require a binary package, not that all merged and unmerged packages require binarys. Does anyone know if that is the way it's supposed to work? Perhaps does anyone know why? -K would be an excellent idiot switch to stop my laptop doing compiles if I forgot to make a package.... but currently it's WAY too much hassle to use. Why does "-puvg --deep world" differ from "-puv --deep world"? Any ideas? Recently I got this from wihtout -g: [ebuild U ] media-libs/libvorbis-1.0.1 [1.0-r4] [ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-xsl-stylesheets-1.62.0-r1 [ebuild N ] app-text/docbook-xml-dtd-4.1.2-r4 and this with -g: [ebuild U ] media-libs/libvorbis-1.0.1 [1.0-r4] Does --deep just not work with -g? I thought of that and ran "--puv world" but I still got the first answer and not the second. Why does -g download already merged dependancys? Now this is getting on my nerves as I really don't have much room on my laptop's disk. When I use -g with BINHOST (set in make.conf), I don't just download the required packages from BINHOST, I also download a pantload of the dependancys. This *really* confuses me, especially as the deps are already calculated and installed. Why does portage need the binarys too? Is there any way to stop that? Is it a bug? Many thanks to any portage gurus responding ;) Nick -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
