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I notice that after emerging software, portage/distfiles contains the
actual downloaded files. There are also stray directories that seem to
remain in /var/tmp/portage.

I have four questions:
1) Is it OK to remove the Distfiles? The only way I would emerge again
would be to upgrade, and that means I would not need the old bz2 files.

2) Is it OK to remove the /var/tmp/portage directories after a successful
emerge?

3) What if I decide to archive the Distfiles to another location? Would
there be any reason I'd bring it back?

4) If it IS necessary to keep them, can I symlink to the archive location
so I don't clutter up my root partition?

The reason I think I have so many distfiles was because of the
installation from CD instructions that said to copy over all the distfiles.

Living and learning. Thanks for the help.

On Fri, 04 Feb 2005 09:06:57 -0500, Peter wrote:

> I notice that after emerging software, portage/distfiles contains the
> actual downloaded files. There are also stray directories that seem to
> remain in /var/tmp/portage.
>
> I have four questions:
> 1) Is it OK to remove the Distfiles? The only way I would emerge again
> would be to upgrade, and that means I would not need the old bz2 files.

Yes, you may remove them

>
> 2) Is it OK to remove the /var/tmp/portage directories after a successful
> emerge?
>

That's why it's in /var/tmp and not elsewhere - you may remove it

> 3) What if I decide to archive the Distfiles to another location? Would
> there be any reason I'd bring it back?

man make.conf
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/index.xml?catid=gentoo


>
> 4) If it IS necessary to keep them, can I symlink to the archive location
> so I don't clutter up my root partition?
>

check above

In alt.os.linux.gentoo, Peter uttered the immortal words:

> I have four questions:
> 1) Is it OK to remove the Distfiles?

Yes. See below before doing anything though.

> The only way I would emerge again
> would be to upgrade, and that means I would not need the old bz2 files.

That depends. If it's a new revision then the main source file(s) will still
be needed. Portage may only need to get a new patch file.

> 2) Is it OK to remove the /var/tmp/portage directories after a successful
> emerge?

AFAICT yes.

> 3) What if I decide to archive the Distfiles to another location? Would
> there be any reason I'd bring it back?

Yes. If you need to re-emerge something due to running revdep-rebuild or if
a new revision is released (see above).

> 4) If it IS necessary to keep them, can I symlink to the archive location
> so I don't clutter up my root partition?

I have heard of people doing something similar but haven't tried it. I run 5
Gentoo boxes here and store all the distfiles on my webserver (that also
acts as a local Portage mirror). I use that server as a mirror so emerge
looks there first (for most things at least) and pulls any needed files
across the network. Only files that haven't been downloaded before get
pulled from Gentoo's distfile mirrors. I keep the webserver relatively
clean by running a script to remove old files. I'll give more details if
you (or anyone else) asks for them.

--
Andy.

On Fri, 04 Feb 2005 14:24:38 +0000, Andy Fraser wrote:

> In alt.os.linux.gentoo, Peter uttered the immortal words:
>
snip...
>> The only way I would emerge again
>> would be to upgrade, and that means I would not need the old bz2 files.
>
> That depends. If it's a new revision then the main source file(s) will
> still be needed. Portage may only need to get a new patch file.

If I did hose the original bz2 file, wouldn't emerge just reget it if
needed?


Thanks to both of you for concise clear help!

Peter wrote:
> If I did hose the original bz2 file, wouldn't emerge just reget it if
> needed?
of course! it tries to reget automagically whatever ain't found locally.

gts
Matt

In alt.os.linux.gentoo, Peter uttered the immortal words:

>> That depends. If it's a new revision then the main source file(s) will
>> still be needed. Portage may only need to get a new patch file.
>
> If I did hose the original bz2 file, wouldn't emerge just reget it if
> needed?

Yes but IMHO it puts extra unneeded load on the distfiles servers. I have
two machines running X.org which is reported as 64MB per install so 128MB
in total. I've emerged three versions of 6.8.0 (-r1, -r3 and -r4) on both
machines due to updates. Assuming that nothing changes in the bulk of the
sources for this example I'd have downloaded the same files 6 times which
is 384MB in total. Because I archive source files until they're no longer
needed by any ebuild I've only downloaded 64MB from a Gentoo distfiles
server and 320MB from my local distfile archive.

I hope this makes sense. :-)

--
Andy.

Peter wrote:

> 1) Is it OK to remove the Distfiles? The only way I would emerge again
> would be to upgrade, and that means I would not need the old bz2 files.

Yes, but usually packages upgrading from -rn to -rn+1 (eg something-r1
to something-r2) use the same source (it is another patch to the same
source). So don't kill BZ2 of currently installed packages.

> 2) Is it OK to remove the /var/tmp/portage directories after a successful
> emerge?

Yes it is.

> 3) What if I decide to archive the Distfiles to another location? Would
> there be any reason I'd bring it back?

I did that trick:

1) copy all distfiles to another directory
2) setup WWW server for that directory (ensuring the distfiles are in
'distfiles' subdirectory, not root directory)
3) tell gentoo to lookup distfiles in local server first.

I did the trick (including local RSYNC) to feed a few machines with
Gentoo at home.

> 4) If it IS necessary to keep them, can I symlink to the archive location
> so I don't clutter up my root partition?

Yes, works for me. 'portage/distfiles' is a symlink at my system.

Well, for my laptop (small HDD) I tried two things:

NFS mount the whole portage tree - this appeared VERY slow, as emerge
browses through it quite a lot.
NFS mount just distfiles - this was quite a good idea, no sources
occupied scarce laptop's HDD. I connected it with DistCC and it worked
perfectly.


General answer to your questions is
"http://www.stacken.kth.se/~foo/gentoo/" with its "DISTCLEAN" package.
It removes all distfiles entries that are no longer referred to by any
installed ebuild. Does quite amazing job.
I modified it to move unreferenced sources to a shadow directory
(instead of nuking'em), and that directory is visible by local WWW
server. So if I wipe file, and it is necessary in a short time (eg,
upgrade - wipe - downgrade sequence), it would be loaded from shadow,
not from net.

--
Pawel Kraszewski