Hi

I am new to Gentoo, and just wondering why you need to have the portage snapshot on disk in order to emerge packages? The snapshot is quite large, can't you get away with just downloading off the internet, the way apt-get does for debian? What is the benefit of having the snapshot?

Thanks

Well originally it was to speed things up, I don't think Daniel Robbins knew that the package database would grow to be the size it is today when he initially thought it up.

I guess portage isn't as elegant as people make it out to be then :/

I don't get your point, but I don't know what did you hear or read about the portage smartness, so I can't tell you if it's true or not either.

First, *every* single distro I know has a package database on disk, usually somewhere under var (ie. /var/lib/rpm, or whatever applies to your distro).

Second, portage is not that big, it's only problem is that being fs-based it is subject to the fs limitations (ie. every file takes a block, even if it's not completely full). If you format your portage partition with a block size of 1024 (or use a loopback filesystem formatted with that block size) you will be able to store it in around 200mb. Database driven package systems will not have this problems since they don't depend on the fs being used. Even with a standard block size of 4096 bytes, it should still fit under 1GB, not a big deal for nowadays standards really.

What takes most of the space is $DISTDIR, which is where the sources are stored. If that bothers you, then delete it daily, people with slow connections definitely want to keep the sources at least for some time, in case they need to reinstall a given package. If you are bothered because of the size of the source files then probably a source distro is not for you. The source packages, specially for the bigger ones, will be much bigger than a binary package. There's no way around that.

Thanks for the clarification, I knew I was missing something!