On Fri, 20 Jun 2003 23:57, you wrote: > Hi! > > 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'? The ebuild files are only one or two kilo-bytes or so for each one, if that. The portage tree, minus the distribution files, is currently ~38 Megs
> 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? There is a mirror in Wellington. http://linux.citylink.co.nz/gentoo/ > 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). I'm timing these rignt now so you can have the correct answers. > 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? In order to use the emerge command, all the necessary compiling tools must be installed on your machine anyway. If you want to you can use them to build things outside the portage / emerge system. Provided the package has been put together for building with the GNU autoconf system, it's just so easy. You just extact the files fom the archive, configure the package, and make it. Literally:- tar -xvzf program-1.2.4.tar.gz cd program-1.2.4/ ./configure make su -c 'make install' all done! > I hope these questions are not too silly, but I couldn't find out > myself. Thanks for any comments/ replies! -- C. S.
