I know that portage team is closed for new features :) but this just came to my mind just 5 minutes ago and seemed good enought to try.
Let's just think that portage handles 5 version of package foo and foo has "http://www.foo.org"; and homepage, "GPL-v2" license and "foo just make your pc look faster" as DESCRIPTION. If we sum all the bytes that this _repeated_ info occupies in app-misc/foo we get 90 bytes (including '=' and '"' for package foo. If all the packages in portage were foo's, according to p.g.o there are 9923 packages, we would have 90*9923 witch gives us 893070bytes (893KB) of information that is repeated in many places. Also, we know that some packages have homepages/descriptions/linceses that are bigger then this so, in reality, this number will probably be bigger in real like. With portage growing every day, this will get even bigger. My ideia was to put this kind of repeated information in some other place that is not the ebuild, let's say for e.g. under app-misc/foo/info or metadata.xml. This way, users with slow connections don't download almost 1MB of info every time they sync. What do you think of this?
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