I have got an idea while looking how ipkg works. It's very hard to use portage on handhelds and other embedded systems due to big size of /usr/portage. I wonder if it's possible to modify portage so it will work like ipkg: after executing 'emerge vim' emerge goes to binpkg server and fetches latest available vim tbz2. Using dependency data from the bundled ebuild it fetches all required packages and proceeds with usual merge. Only a part of /usr/portage hierarchy (eclasses, profiles, etc.) is required for successful merge. The second big part of portage, /var/db/pkg can be stored in some compressed format to reduce size. That could be achieved with in-portage support for squashfs and overlays or more simple zip compressor. Reproducible: Always
i dont think there's much value in trying to trim down portage ... it's written in python which means you easily add ~20+megs of overhead to the system we have qmerge from the portage-utils package to address this embedded need
