On 09/12/03 Joshua Banks wrote: > Hey Alan, > > I just installed Gentoo on a new machine and just did the first > "emerge sync" and I started fixpages at 9:11 pm and its exactly > 11:11pm and fix packages isn't done yet.. I'm a little mystified as > well. The only thing that I have installed rightnow is KDE and > XFREE.....and that was off the LiveCD via GRP...
It doesn't matter what you've installed, it matters how many packages you have in /usr/portage/packages and how many package moves took place. > I wish there was a better explantion of fixpackages because its always > been dog slow for me and I can't seem to find any NON-Engineering > explantion of why it spits out some of the things that it does and > what fixpackages is actally doing that needs 2 hrs to do it on fastass > system. Yours is a little beefier than mine but its very compairable. Ok, I'll try to explain it: portage stores information about the package names and categories for dependencies in the .tbz2 files. Now if a package has moved in the tree (like the recent app-games -> games-* split) this information can become incorrect and should be updated. A little example what could happen if it is not updated: - you have a .tbz2 package for package foo, which has a dependency on app-misc/bar - package app-misc/bar is moved to net-misc/bar in the tree - you try to install foo with your .tbz2 package, portage looks for app-misc/bar (because the .tbz2 wasn't updated), can't find it because it was moved and aborts the installation Now the fact that fixpackages is so slow is because to update this information the .tbz2 needs to be uncompressed, then the information can be updated and then it needs to be recompressed. This takes some time for 1 or 2 GB of data. I'm currently trying to optimize the code a bit, but I think for a dramatic improvement we would have to drop the current .tbz2 format (so we can save the uncompress-recompress steps) itself which is unlikely to happen anytime soon. > I've alwasy gotten this: > Cannot update binary: > Destination exists: > !!! app-admin/gentoolkit-0.1.30 -> app-portage/gentoolkit-0.1.30 > -Unquote This happens if the package name already has been updated, but there is probably more to fix in the dependency information. Read it as a status message, not an error message. > OK...So what the hell does this mean and what if anything do I need to > do about it because"Fixpackages" doesn't fix crap....I get this same > message no matter how many times that I run it.. fixpackages does something, but you don't see it in most cases. I hope I could explain it in a not-too-much-engineering way. Marius -- Public Key at http://www.genone.de/info/gpg-key.pub In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be Light.' And there was still nothing, but you could see a bit better.
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