Hi, I've set up a new Gentoo system and I thought that FEATURES="confcache" sounded cool. After installing several packages, I noticed that they complained: > WARN: compile > disabling confcache, binary cannot be found So I tried to emerge confcache, and it didn't work, because confcache has been removed from Portage. I've read some bug reports (most notably bug #156308), and finally understood that confcache has been removed because it's broken (at least for now). Therefore, I would like to suggest that Portage either a) doesn't react to FEATURES='confcache' at all anymore or b) stops throwing warnings or c) informs the user that confcache is broken and points to an explanation. The latter is my favorite. :) That way, users would not have to look for the package to find out that confcache is broken.
b) will always occur (we want people using confcache to know if the it's being used or not). a) will not happen until we can externalize how confcache is integrated into the build process. Right now it is called explicity in ebuild.sh (or one of the derivative files, I forget where econf is defined). There are some plans (by a user) to redo parts of this to allow easier customization. c) Thats part of the point; it's not broken, per se. The problem is two fold. It works great about 90% of the time but there are some packages with incorrectly written configure scripts. These scripts break the configure cache; thus packages you emerge after the package with the broken configure scripts get a bogus value from the cache and break. The confcache package, by the way, is in a number of developer overlays including mine on overlays.gentoo.org ;) PS: FEATURES=confcache has been removed from the documentation (afaik Mike did it in svn a few weeks ago), so I consider this bug fixed. If you know where to get the binary you can still use confcache; I consider it a good feature...it just has some quirks. I consider it similar to say FireFox, it's a great browser but sometimes it crashes and needs a restart; that doesn't mean you shouldn't use FireFox, it just means it has some quirks and you need to deal with em ;)
