Nikos Chantziaras wrote:

> J.O. Aho wrote:
>>> And space is showing signs of getting tight already. I only have a
>>> base-system, and yet it eats 3GB (from 10GB total). It looks like
>>> Gentoo will need outrageous amounts of space for a full KDE desktop.
>>
>> Each time you build something, you download the source and gentoo
>> patches, you should clean out your /usr/portage/distfiles of all
>> unneeded files. A full install of KDE will take something like 511M when
>> compiled.
>
> I used `eclean --destructive distfiles` to clean, but it's not really
> deleting anything. Is it safe to simply `rm -rf
> /usr/portage/distfiles/*` as well as `rm -rf /var/tmp/portage/*`? Those
> two directory trees eat about 1GB right now.

While it's safe, I wouldn't clear out distfiles. /var/tmp/portage, however,
is safe as long as you don't have a current emerge running ;-)

The reason I keep distfiles (and mine is currently sitting at 3.3GB) is
because I find I'm rebuilding packages intermittently. Keeping the source
around speeds things up, even though I have a 10Mb internet connection.
It's also much kinder to the mirrors in that I'm not re-downloading (much)
each time I do a revdep-rebuild.

That and I have all my gentoo boxes mounting from a single location, so it
actually has the source to all builds on all machines. (Too bad eclean
couldn't check ALL machines for needed sources... luckily, the other
machines are almost solely subsets of my primary machine, so it's pretty
close.) This means that I download each source tarball once, and compile
it up to three times. (Yes, I could just reuse the binaries across the two
P4's, though not the P3, and if I had more P4s, I'd probably do so.) More
if I have to revdep-rebuild.