On Wed, Jul 5, 2017 at 8:57 AM, Harry Putnam <rea...@newsguy.com> wrote: > I skimmed thru some of the documentation about using binary pkgs > online, but it kind of indicated it might not be possible to get > everything in that format.
As long as you use the default USE flags I don't see why you wouldn't be able to get everything online which is binary-redistributable. If you want USE=-bindist (which most people do) that list is going to be smaller. The biggest issue is that I don't think anybody maintains a public repository of packages. Tools exist to build one, and I'm sure that organizations may use these internally. However, there isn't anywhere a user can just point portage at and ask it to go fetching binary packages. > > Wondering if using mostly binary pkgs is a biggish hassle or if it can > be done... and done without the time-sink always involved in `emerge > world'..(over time)? For a single system there isn't much benefit in general, though for reinstalls you can certainly save binary packages of everything you do build. I do this for everything I build. I also have Gentoo pre-build binary packages where it can overnight so that I can do quick installs during the day after reviewing the list of new packages to install. However, I'm still building everything once no matter what, so it doesn't save on CPU. I'm just time-shifting the builds to before when I review the package update list (I don't blindly install updates). If I had multiple identical hosts then the binary packages would probably save me a heap of time though. > So, can someone be a gentoo user and NOT subscribe to one of the > main tenets of the gentoo view of things. Building packages is a means to an end - finding ways to do it only as much as possible merely makes you efficient, and I'd certainly say that this is in the spirit of Gentoo. I'd love to see a Gentoo binary repository with default USE flags, with the package manager being smart enough to find whether the configuration it wants to install happens to be pre-built. Users could still tweak USE flags. Obviously tweaking global USE flags is going to make most of the binary packages useless and it would fall back to current behavior. However, if you only wanted to tweak flags that impact a subset of the packages you'd benefit from the binary builds of anything your settings didn't touch. CFLAGS would be a bigger problem. While I imagine that we could have more than one set of those pre-built we certainly couldn't cover every variation Gentoo users want. CFLAGS have a much wider impact than even USE flags. Something like this would probably also drive changes like changing USE=-docs to an install mask. There is no sense keeping two versions of a binary package around just to avoid installing docs. -- Rich
