On Tue, 2012-03-27 at 20:01 +0200, Sven Vermeulen wrote: > On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 07:49:00PM +0200, Pacho Ramos wrote: > > I am a bit surprised handbook still doesn't suggest people to create a > > separate partition for /usr/portage tree. I remember my first Gentoo > > systems had it inside / and that lead to a lot of fragmentation, much > > slower "emerge -pvuDN world" (I benchmarked it when I changed my > > partitioning scheme to put /usr/portage) separate and a lot of disk > > space lost (I remember portage tree reached around 3 GB of disk space > > while I am now running with 300MB) > > > > Could handbook suggest people to put /usr/portage on a different > > partition then? The only doubt I have is what filesystem would be better > > for it, in my case I am using reiserfs with tail enabled, but maybe you > > have other different setups. > > To be honest, I don't think it is wise to describe it in the Gentoo Handbook > just yet. I don't mind having it documented elsewhere, but the separate > partition is not mandatory for getting Gentoo up and running. The > instructions currently also just give an example partition layout and tell > users that different layouts are perfectly possible. > > We need to take into consideration what is needed (must) for a Gentoo > installation, what is seriously recommended (should), what is nice to have > (could), etc. And for me, having a separate /usr/portage is a nice-to-have > imo.
The partitioning scheme is something that the user needs to decide on *before* getting Gentoo up and running. After the user had finished installing the operating system, it's too late to inform him about the advantages of a separate /usr/portage. IMHO, chapter 4 of the handbook needs the following changes: 1. ext4, not ext3, needs to be recommended as the default filesystem. We have kernel 3.2 marked stable, there is no need to keep talking about ext4 as if it's something experimental. 2. The handbook should mention that a separate small /usr/portage partition can noticeably improve performance for users with a rotational hard drive, and that it's not needed for solid-state drives. It should also mention that using Gentoo with a separate /usr/portage partition will require some additional configuration (such as changing DISTDIR and PKGDIR to avoid running out of space). -Alexandre.
