Comments on Funtoo by Daniel Robbins: Resolving Sabayon and Gentoo Peformance Issues

Great to see you back on the gentoo front again. ...

2007-12-15T14:15:00.000-07:00

Great to see you back on the gentoo front again. Doubly pleased to see that you're willing to look at other gentoo-based distros instead of giving them a snobby purist eye. This is greatly appreciated by those of us who are using Sabayon. I hope you're a role-model for other gentoo people in the future, because we haven't been getting the warmest reception in freenodes #gentoo, yet many of us in freenode's #sabayon channel are giving help to straight gentoo users because they've found us to be more helpful. I hope to see your continued cooperation with other gentoo forks in the future. :)

Hi Daniel, I've been a Gentoo user for a long time...

2007-11-21T10:20:00.000-07:00

Hi Daniel,

I've been a Gentoo user for a long time and I've never had a chance to say thanks :) ... so Thanks!!

Anyway, I was just reading about your suggestions for the future of Portage, and I thought I'd suggest a couple of my own.

I'm quite often tempted to try a set of ~x86 marked packages (>=gnome-2.20 and all of its dependencies for example, or something like a new ATI driver). Sometimes the upgrades work, and sometimes several things are completely broken.

What I think could be much smoother would be having 'restore points' built into portage if one has FEATURES="buildpkgs" set.

Aside from that, I think that more should be done with binary distributions. From a green perspective, why should tens of thousands of users be compiling packages from scratch all the time? We're just wasting precious watts of likely non-renewable-sourced electricity.

Then I thought - well... take the event-space consisting of all of the permutations of use-flags, versions, and arches, and then make a DB with a list of links to matching, pre-compiled binaries.

Of course it's completely massive, but for several servers it shouldn't be too big of a load to distribute between all of them. Especially considering that the table would be relatively sparse due to dependency ranges.

Why not have a google-esque distributed filesystem for all of them... even a P2P binary package system :)

Hey KernelOfTruth,Yep, everything is all right. I ...

2007-10-05T09:09:14.862-06:00

Hey KernelOfTruth,

Yep, everything is all right. I am working several new blog posts after neglecting by blog for a while. Will have some new posts soon! :)

Hi Daniel,it's been some time since you wrote your...

2007-10-05T04:56:00.000-06:00

Hi Daniel,

it's been some time since you wrote your last blog entry

everything allright ?

please keep us updated (as your time allows to)

Mat

portage not being "all things to all people" is an...

2007-09-29T23:22:00.000-06:00

portage not being "all things to all people" is an abstract idea, very.

emerge checks USE flags, deps, compiles the source and installs the binaries into /, so I think i does its job well.

problem is in how dependencies are handled, but no other distro or OS seem to have done it perfectly either. portage is as good as apt-get/pacman and years ahead of yum.

Now is it practical to embark on a wholesale rewrite of portage, throwing out hundreds of man-hours of work?(it was not implied, but one can easily assume)
One breakage is not reason enough to do so, when your own patch seems to have fixed the problem.

Among the hundreds of packages in gentoo, a handfull of packages have large/convoluted deps such as gnome or kde. perhaps it is better to start thinking how to simplify those.

recoll, based on xapian also isn't that bad, unfor...

2007-08-28T17:01:29.189-06:00

recoll, based on xapian also isn't that bad, unfortunately it doesn't seem to index the files that well

in all cases we need a desktop searchtool whose index-building can be started on-demand - in contrast to beagle

pkgcore is a great tool - I prefer it over paludis, it however (still) doesn't seem to work that well as portage in terms of 'emerge -e system' and especially 'emerge -e world'

Daniel,How do you feel about pkgcore and pauldis? ...

2007-08-27T22:13:30.425-06:00

Daniel,

How do you feel about pkgcore and pauldis? Personally, I'm more of a fan of pauldis, even if it means a bit of a learning curve for Gentoo users. In my opinion, I'm not sure we should constantly be thinking of how to fix portage, but consider if portage is the right tool for the task.

And not only is Beagle a huge performance drain, it also eats up gigs of storage. On a laptop especially you don't want the constant thrashing of your HDD. If you need a good integrated desktop search, I can't recommend Strigi enough. The performance is quite nice.

Hey Robbins. I was wondering if you could provide ...

2007-08-26T20:09:28.877-06:00

Hey Robbins. I was wondering if you could provide that patch to us Sabayon Users. Is it an overall portage problem or is it a problem affecting only us Sabayon Users? And yes I do agree with disabling Beagle. It runs at 50% CPU on both cores even when it isn't indexing and I really dislike it.

Timothy, I happen to totally agree with you. There...

2007-08-23T17:06:59.542-06:00

Timothy, I happen to totally agree with you. There are several paradigms in Portage that need to evolve quite a bit to make it more flexible and powerful.

IMHO portage should die and we should use a differ...

2007-08-23T06:27:16.771-06:00

IMHO portage should die and we should use a different package manager or rewite totally portage

"I've been wondering for a while now why we can't ...

2007-08-19T14:53:28.877-06:00

"I've been wondering for a while now why we can't move past user modified Portage configuration and siimply use Git for configuration at the user level."

So a gentoo based distro could be defined in terms of installed packages and a patch for vanilla configs?
I kinda like the idea :)

I've been wondering for a while now why we can't m...

2007-08-19T13:51:37.767-06:00

I've been wondering for a while now why we can't move past user modified Portage configuration and siimply use Git for configuration at the user level.

Like what I do? Then Git my config. Want a desktop with KDE for x86_64 and multilib? Then Git a known good (and tested) set of configuration files (package.mask, make.conf, etc) for a desktop.

This lets developers choose to ignore it in the interest of their development while giving the true "users" a one-stop-shopping experience for getting up and running.

Kat and its equivalent Beagle can drain your CPU.I...

2007-08-18T14:25:18.098-06:00

Kat and its equivalent Beagle can drain your CPU.
I remove both, but especially Beagle which runs on MONO!

Nuf said.

Pete Woods

Yes... Gentoo must focus on be a meta-distro with ...

2007-08-14T23:05:05.915-06:00

Yes... Gentoo must focus on be a meta-distro with specialized teams doing the heavy lift for the user!

I agree, if Beagle is a resource drain it shouldn'...

2007-08-14T22:24:30.742-06:00

I agree, if Beagle is a resource drain it shouldn't be enabled by default.

I like SL linux and where it's going - Compiz fusion set up and running OTB Wow! It would be nice if the upcoming SL mini would ship without Beagle ;-) Hint.

Hello.As a user of both Gentoo and FreeBSD/OpenBSD...

2007-08-14T22:12:55.700-06:00

Hello.

As a user of both Gentoo and FreeBSD/OpenBSD. Why is it that portage is more troublesome than say the freebsd ports system?

I can't help wondering how ubuntu got dragged into...

2007-08-13T22:13:18.666-06:00

I can't help wondering how ubuntu got dragged into this matter. Ubuntu has nothing to do with portage or Sabayon.

As for Beagle, with every linux install I do the first thing I do after the system is running is get rid of Beagle. In openSUSE it made my computer so slow it was nearly useless.

I'm typing this on a computer running Sabayon 3.4e. Beagle has been removed. Don't use it - don't want it. My files are well organized. I remember where I put things. If I need to search for a file I use Tools - Find File in Konqueror.

Desktop search utilities like Beagle are a waste of resources, a useless duplication of functions, and promote disorganized use of your computer.

That's my opinion. I realize that others will disagree. For this reason I like Fabio's suggestion.

Amen (to subprojects). I've been waiting for this ...

2007-08-13T18:02:42.430-06:00

Amen (to subprojects). I've been waiting for this for years: Gentoo is a meta-distribution sorely in need of some distributions. Portage opens up the space to do exciting things, but leaving the rest to the user is far from ideal: developer teams focused around specific package-sets and/or system roles are what's needed, so that users can test these specific distributions (and so contribute to their development via bug-testing etc.) rather than testing their own unique setups and hoping that portage can somehow cope with an infinite variety of situations.

Daniel Robbins is the man!!Daniel I'm so glad you'...

2007-08-13T15:44:29.199-06:00

Daniel Robbins is the man!!

Daniel I'm so glad you're getting fueled once again about Gentoo. You should be leading this monster, I've always thought so.

Any potential resource hog (e.g. Beagle) should de...

2007-08-13T08:07:49.918-06:00

Any potential resource hog (e.g. Beagle) should default to asking the user for approval before running. I run Sabayon, have multiple 300GB external USB drives formatted NTFS, run KTorrent, and like to have Rhythmbox keep itself up-to-date. It mostly works. Throwing Beagle in as well is the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Windows was more problematic.

Yup emerge -up world also has just speeded up quit...

2007-08-12T16:26:27.858-06:00

Yup emerge -up world also has just speeded up quite a bit on my system after I upgraded from 2.1.3.3 to 2.1.3.5, except for this blog this is the first positive change that I feel and know of that resulted from Daniel being back with Gentoo, nice :)

I look forward to "good old drobbins" helping many other positive changes in my favorite (and only OS) in the future.

I think that Beagle should just fire up on demand....

2007-08-12T07:15:40.022-06:00

I think that Beagle should just fire up on demand. That's the best choice for both points of view

Beagle was such a hog it made my system unusable. ...

2007-08-11T22:59:24.744-06:00

Beagle was such a hog it made my system unusable. It should never be enabled by default.

If users just want a standard distribution then they should use Ubuntu or a binary Sabayon Distro. I like the way portage or more precisely pkgcore is going. The focus on speed is just wrong.(Speed is important but should not be the central requirement) I fact that I can install packages with complex dependencies is one of Gentoo strengths. Gentoo should not try to become just another Distro......

Ubuntu might not be Gentoo, but if Sabayon aims to...

2007-08-11T22:39:17.412-06:00

Ubuntu might not be Gentoo, but if Sabayon aims to be a polished desktop distribution it should consider user's needs.

Sure, if I am searching for something I'll use grep just like the next geek. But that is not who Sabayon is targeting, their first point in "What makes us different" on their website is "Our decisions are driven by you, our users". If Sabayon's users are also it's developers, like Gentoo, it's fine. But if there is any aspiration to target the common end user, they should listen to real users.

Real users want a way to search photos, movies, IM conversations, e-mails, documents, web browsing history, etc. On windows they have that Vista thing, or Google desktop, on Mac OS X they have spotlight, and on Linux they have Beagle or Tracker.

I've never felt the need for Beagle at all. Not su...

2007-08-11T20:49:25.029-06:00

I've never felt the need for Beagle at all. Not sure why other people do, but if it's a performance drain on a critical application (like, say, *portage*), then it should definitely be off by default rather than on by default.