Hi, may be this is already possible and I am only repeating a very old idea, but...
When emerging applikations, which are not already in the system, the sources wll be downloaded from the net into /usr/portage/distfiles/. Over the time, this directory will grow. Is it possible to instruct emerge to search for already downloaded archives in two directories but write only to one directory? This would enable the following: Say, the distfiles directory of system will take about 800MB of space. Now one would be able to store/backup this stuff onto a CD and mount this this CD under /usr/portage/distfiles_cd. When emerging a new applikation, emerge will first look under /usr/portage/distfiles_cd nad -- if not found -- under (for example) /usr/portage/distfiles_new and if not found will download the archive of this applikation to /usr/portage/distfiles_new. When /usr/portage/distfiles_new becomes too big, one will combine the contents of /usr/portage/distfiles_cd and /usr/portage/distfiles_new again and burn the result onto a cd, which can be mounted under /usr/portage/distfiles_cd again. And so on. Would save a lot of space under / of files, which are used not so often. Is this already be possible or is this an idea may be? Keep hacking! mcc -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
