Firstly let me thank everbody for their responses.
By "snapshot" (please excuse me, I am a noobie), do you mean have the system regenerate a "snapshot" of where the system is today. So that if I were to a "merge --newuse world", only the active packages in use as of today would be rebuilt. Or I just totally lost somewhere out in left field?
No, what is meant is a Portage snapshot, such as the one used when installing without a network connection.
Quote:
Installing a Portage Snapshot and Source Code from LiveCD
There is a Portage snapshot available on the Universal LiveCDs. Since you are reading this, we can safely assume you are using such a LiveCD. To install this snapshot, take a look inside /mnt/cdrom/snapshots/ to see what snapshot we have available:
/endquote
Snapshots can also be downloaded from the Internet, for example from ftp://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/pub/linux/gentoo/snapshots/
So basically, if you just wipe the Portage directory, a snapshot allows you to start "clean", if you would find that useful. Many of us find it sufficient to just delete the contents of /usr/portage/distfiles. Ebuilds themselves don't take up much space.
HTH, Holly -- [email protected] mailing list
