On 9/8/06, Vladimir G. Ivanovic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Thu, 2006-09-07 at 15:30 -0400, Andy Dustman wrote: > gentoo-server is probably not the best list for this discussion, but I > suspect many or most of the people on it will have an interest in > this, so it is somewhat-on-topic. If there's any interest/traction, > then I'll redo this as a GLEP. If you like the idea but think it > should be discussed off this list, contact me directly. > > There are two main issues with the Portage tree as I see it: > > 1) There's no way to get just security updates.I run this script every hour: #!/bin/sh glsa-check -f new 2>/dev/null [[ $? -eq 0 ]] || echo "glsa-check: error" Does this not do what you're looking for?
No, but I do something like this already in my own update/sync script, and the output is mailed to me: emerge --sync --quiet --nocolor glsa-check --dump affected emerge world --pretend --update --changelog --columns --nocolor Getting security-only updates is not a major issue for me, but some people really want them for long-term stability.
> 2) Even with recent metadata cache update improvements, it still takes > a long time, and a lot of resources, to sync the tree. I do my updates early in the morning when I'm asleep, so I don't really care how long they take (as long as it's less than 4 hours). Why does update speed matter to you?
Speed is not the only, or even primary, issue, though it's a little slow (approximately 10 minutes, mostly disk-bound). I do not have a lack of network bandwidth (225 Mbps backbone, and gigabit throughout most of the local network). Disk bandwidth and load on the mirrors (network, disk, CPU) are probably more important. You can throw hardware at the problem (i.e. add more mirrors), though as I understand it, this depends on the goodwill of volunteers. Right now, there are about 150K files in the Portage tree; this includes directories as they are sent in the file list by rsync.That's 150K stat() calls (at least) on both the mirror and the client. Having a seperate updates overlay should reduce this dramatically; immediately after a new release, the updates overlay would be empty. The question is, How quickly would an updates overlay grow? Mike Kelly mentioned emerge-delta-webrsync, so I took a look at the size of the entire compressed Portage tree (31 M) vs. the size of the compressd patches (250 K, rough average by eye), and this looks like approximately 1% per day. If that's really the case, then an updates-only overlay may not be viable. However, getting compressed patches is probably a big improvement over rsync, so I'll have to try it out. -- This message has been scanned for memes and dangerous content by MindScanner, and is believed to be unclean. -- [email protected] mailing list
