I have an idea for a change to the way the base Gentoo system is installed. The idea is that rather than extracting a tarball with the entire base system, instead, you would use the portage system to install each of those packages from prebuilt packages using the -k option. Rather than having to list each and every package(87 in a stage3 tarball), the command would probably take the form of a short shell script listing each of the packages in the stage1, stage2, or stage3 tarballs and it would be a command like: emerge stage3. The benefit of this is that you now have packages(which should be confirmed to be working) for the base system which you can individually reinstall if you were to ever damage one of those packages. For example, if you start with a clean install of Gentoo, emerge sync, and find an updated GCC. You might want to update GCC before adding any other software to the system. If during the update of GCC something goes wrong, you can just do an "emerge -k gcc" and the original GCC that came with the base sytem will be reinstalled. From there, you could try again to build GCC or just wait for the ebuild to to fixed. Fairly simple. Additionally, this would save space(~62MB) on the live CD's because rather than having a different stage1, stage2 and stage3 tarball, you would just have one instance of each package. Then a script would define which subset of those packages would actually get installed(similar to the way the kde ebuild is just a list of the kde base packages). Currently, you have the redundancy of 3 copies of the stage1 software, 2 of stage2 software, and 1 of stage3 software. Using individual prebuilt packages rather than 1 large tarball would provide a safety-net with finer grained control. I make it a habit that whenever I update software which is part of the base system, I also have a package built. That way, if in the future I update that package again and it doesn't work, I can easily revert back to the last working version. Thanks
Not really a portage issue
this feature will be implemented with 2004.0
