Gentoo Portage

[MyWorld]

It seems that IS is not too keen on keeping the distfiles up to date as of late.

It has been maybe a month now and each and every time I synced an tried to update, I have to connect internationally to get the updates. I have even waited 12 hours since I synced, but they still have almost none of the updated files.

Is there a more up to date distfile server in SA?

 

[andres101]

gentoo.mirror.ac.za. ftp and http works.

I usually put the local mirror and distfiles.gentoo.org in my make.conf.

not all files are in the gentoo distfiles. sometimes licensing restrictions prevents them from mirroring the file.

if you are worried about the amount of bandwidth used by the distfiles, have a look at the app-portage/getdelta package. there is a similar package for portage called app-portage/emerge-delta-webrsync.

getdelta works extremely well. it checks your distfiles for a similar file and then requests the differences from a server. it is quite common to save 90% using this method.

 

[stickytoffee]

+1 for gentoo.mirror.ac.za ... they seem more up to date than IS.

 

[milomak]

+1 for gentoo.mirror.ac.za

 

[icyrus]

What is the quality of portage like these days?

 

[milomak]

pretty good

 

[andres101]

What is the quality of portage like these days?

depends on what you mean by quality.

you still get conflicts and the odd missing dependencies, but it constantly improves. I haven't broken any systems by doing a emerge -avND world in a while.

as always, most open source packages are available and installing them is a breeze.

 

[icyrus]

depends on what you mean by quality.

you still get conflicts and the odd missing dependencies, but it constantly improves. I haven't broken any systems by doing a emerge -avND world in a while.

as always, most open source packages are available and installing them is a breeze.

A couple of years ago when I stilled used to use gentoo, portage had degraded quite quickly. Nearly every second update would break something in interesting ways.

Glad to hear its getting better.

 

[MyWorld]

You now have such a wide "variety" of the original portage that it is quite daunting for even the old veterans.

First you have you arch to set, stable or unstable, unstable meaning what it says, it worked on the devs computer but there is not sufficient tests run to guarantee that it will work on your PC. (x86/~x86, etc. the ~ denoting unstable)

You then have dead standard portage, and like mentioned this is really stable and rarely breaks anything, even on the ~x86 branch. It gets patched quickly but updates are not as bleeding edge as years back.

This is where we welcome overlays, an add-on service to portage if you will, and here is one of the overlay descriptions (out of the +/- 60 available) to give you an idea of what it is all about:
* break-my-gentoo-main [Rsync ] (rsync://rsync.breakmygentoo.net/bmg-main/bmg-main

The most bleeding edge of any distro there is. Overlays are mainly community run with a few devs throwing in experimental packages here and there. Some of the overlays act as testing beds before merging the packages with the main Gentoo portage, like the kde-testing overlay.
Overlays is where the breaks occur, but is huge fun!