The live CD boots up nicely and provides a graphical install but goes through a number of steps that are of no benefit. 1) Copy the portage-2007.0.tar.bz2 to the harddisk then uses this file to uncompress to the hard disk. The hard disk then has much more work to do. It would be better to uncompress from the CD to the harddisk in one go. 2) Having created the portage tree, it copies the files for the actual install from the CD and ignores the portage tree! Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install from gentoo 2007.0 live cd. 2. I used a separate tty to monitor which files where being written to. 3. A better install would be to have it copy the live CD to the harddisk in one operation. cp -R loses permissions and file ownership but something that maintains the ownership and permissions would be far far faster.
(In reply to comment #0) > 1) Copy the portage-2007.0.tar.bz2 to the harddisk then uses this file to > uncompress to the hard disk. The hard disk then has much more work to do. It > would be better to uncompress from the CD to the harddisk in one go. Eh, I'll give you this one. This is a throwback to when the installer would fetch the snapshot from a gentoo mirror for a non-networkless install. > 2) Having created the portage tree, it copies the files for the actual install > from the CD and ignores the portage tree! False. The portage tree is needed for dep calculation, even when doing a binary install. It is most definitely used.
(In reply to comment #0) > A better install would be to have it copy the live CD to the harddisk in one > operation. cp -R loses permissions and file ownership but something that > maintains the ownership and permissions would be far far faster. Feel free to submit a patch.
When I first ran this I think I used advanced. My recollection was that the compressed file was copied, uncompressed, then the portage tree was deleted and then a new portage tree created. I just ran a new networkless install in a vmware and I didn't spot the tree being deleted. I will do some more tests in this respect. As to fixes, it'll take me a little time to get into the program code. I mainly develop on windows so I'm not familiar with recent linux code writing. Last source unix I wrote C for was 1989. Obviously fix 1 is to use the compressed file from the CD and not copy it. Fix 2 is, to borrow a term from my BT Sun solaris days, is to create a jump start program that does something similar to the copy I said above. The '-p' option of copy will do it. Fix 2B would be to use dd as is is far faster than cp, and then to fix up the partitions afterwards, but the limitations is that the overall partition scheme would be limited to at best /boot and /. I would like to separate the portae information to limit the disk size for better use in VMs, and mount the portage directories. There are 2 reasons for this, one is to disk usage by sharing common parts among many virtual machines. the second is that the files change often, and when using vmware snapshots the disk space would grow rapidly and performance decrease.
The installer is deprecated.
