[gentoo-dev] FEATURES to cut the excess in portage

External Since: Jul 19, 2006 Posts: 8

Two patches which allow a user to bypass files created with doman and
dodoc in FEATURES:

FEATURES="noman nodoc" emerge -av foo

http://jawed.name/dev/gentoo/nodoc.patch
http://jawed.name/dev/gentoo/noman.patch

Quick background/inspiration:

I found myself having to make an initrd suitable to do PXE boots for
our business and educational clusters. I was exploiting the ever so
useful ROOT option for portage to emerge packages into the initrd
build directory. However, because this was an initrd being sent over
the network, total size was important.

At larger sizes the loading the initrd would actually cause a kernel
panic on pivoting root...whether this was a result of a kernel config,
a set maximum size limit, or something else I'm not exactly sure of.

Looking at the output of du, I started first by removing the man and
documentation files. This brought the size of my final initrd down
significantly (~287MiB to ~242MiB).

Possible issues/bigger picture:

While I was making the changes to doman and prepman, I kept thinking
of how this really is part of a bigger picture, [I think] maybe the
whole minimal concept should be abstracted out of USE (for packages
that have it) and be part of FEATURES (for all packages).
In my case because I was using ROOT in portage to build out an initrd,
I didn't really need or want man or documentation for the packages I
was putting in.

At the end of the day, maybe there should be a specific mix of
FEATURES such as "nodoc noman" and/or a granular mix of "minimal"
which encompasses the previous+more. Obviously it's open for a lot of
discussion and the patches attached should/would probably not be a
final solution...the goal was that this would be a start.

We've been using this patch and it's worked out for us well. Your
mileage may vary, if it does, please say something! Smile

Thanks,
John

PS Sorry to the devs I was working with (you know who you are Smile

for
my inactivity lately...moving my life 1600 miles on a weeks' notice
hasn't exactly been the easiest thing, definitely hasn't helped for
the free time column.
--
gentoo-dev.DeleteThis@gentoo.org mailing list

External Since: Jul 19, 2006 Posts: 8

Ah yep, missed it. Nevermind my chatter Smile

On 11/5/06, Tobias Scherbaum <dertobi123.TakeThisOut@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Am Sonntag, den 05.11.2006, 20:08 +0100 schrieb Christian Heim:
> > On Sunday, 05. November. 2006 19:02, John Jawed wrote:
> > > Two patches which allow a user to bypass files created with doman and
> > > dodoc in FEATURES:
> > >
> > > FEATURES="noman nodoc" emerge -av foo
> > >
> > > http://jawed.name/dev/gentoo/nodoc.patch
> > > http://jawed.name/dev/gentoo/noman.patch
> >
> > Err, isn't current portage already having FEATURES="noman" and "nodoc" ? At
> > least last time I used it, it was there ...
>
> Don't forget about "noinfo" Wink

>
> Tobias
>
>
>
--
gentoo-dev.TakeThisOut@gentoo.org mailing list