On Wed, 13 Aug 2014 21:35:47 +0000 (UTC), James wrote: > > That's exactly what it is for. One-off files that the ebuild > > downloads, uses and then no longer needs. Nothing in $DISTDIR is > > needed by a running system.
> Ok so anything needed for a build of a particular package goes into > /usr/portage/distfiles? anything that needs to be downloaded, yes. > I thought ebuilds use /var/tmp/portage for that. No. PORTAGE_TMPDIR is the temporary directory use for building the software to install. > If in needs to hang around longer (than a /tmp file typically > hangs out for, when not put it under the another logical place. $DISTDIR is the logical place. It is where portage puts the files that projects use the distribute their work, hence the name. > Like I said I thought /distfiles/ contains compressed sources > and other file needed, all rolled into a common format, like*.bz2. It contains source files in whatever format they are supplied, which may or may not be compressed (think ebuilds that download from a VCS). source in this case means the source of the software, not necessarily source code as some ebuilds are for binary distributions. > It we start (continue) strowing files into /distfiles/ where does it > end? With a full hard drive, unless you maintain it, this is Gento after all. But other distros do a similar thing, Debian downloads all the .deb. files for an operation before it starts installing them, and keeps them in a cache. I really don't see the problem here. Portage has to download files, it has to save them somewhere, and we users may want to keep them for later re-use. Portage does all of that in a sane manner. The only thing that stops you from seeing this is the invalid assumption that $DISTDIR is only for compressed tarballs of source code. man make.conf describes what $DISTDIR, $PORTAGE_TMPDIR etc. are for, you cannot redefine that on a whim and then say portage is doing it wrong. -- Neil Bothwick To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
