With the Gentoo install fest coming up, I'd like to ask a couple of silly questions. I've done some research on www.gentoo.org myself, but some points are still not clear to me, yet.
1. As I understood the documentation, the portage tree consists of the ebuild files of all packages currently part of Gentoo. How big are these files and how much data would I have to download each time I 'emerge sync'?
2. As I further understood, the ebuilds contain the location where the source can be retrieved. Does this imply that the sorces have to be downloaded from the actual project sites (eg. www.gimp.org) or are the sources available from the Gentoo mirrors?
3. How long is the compile time for a medium sized package, say eg. gimp again? I know that this is a silly question and can't be answered directly, because it'll of course depend on my hardware. But if you could compare the compile time of a package to the compile time of a 2.4.x kernel, it'd give me a hint what I'd have to expect on my machine (P4M 1.8).
4. And finally, if there're packages which have not yet an ebuild in portage, how difficult will it be to compile those without the compiling tools of portage?
I hope these questions are not too silly, but I couldn't find out myself. Thanks for any comments/ replies!
Cheers, Conrad.
