This is a feature request for package managers, to imitate to improve the sync capabilities of binary based distros. The idea is to reduce the synchronization time and the size of the package tree for users. On a general file system the portage tree is over 600Mb and an eix-sync is at least 5min (sync+metadata building). [In comparison, ubuntu sync is 30 sec, and no need for the full package trees, even when building source packages]. With overlays it obviously gets worse. On the Gentoo SoC ml it was suggested to use squashfs to reduce the tree. I see this more a workaround only used by few users and does not reduce sync time anyway. One idea is the one submitted on the Gentoo Google Summer of Code 2009 (1), I would like to see whether it's reasonable to submit such a proposal for package managers: synchronize the cache, and download required packages upon request. 1 - http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2009_ideas#Cache_sync Reproducible: Always
This isn't really PMS's domain to nail down at this juncture- suggest you take the idea to a specific PM and work out a proposal that works and doesn't beat the snot out of the upstream servers. Among other things, you're going to have to account for the fact that rsync is a rolling snapshot of the tree- it's not guranteed possible to get a file that was available at the time of original sync'ing N days later- the file may no longer exist due to the ebuild in question no longer existing. For bin distros, this is easy enough to deal with- they just keep the binpkg around for a while, not hard when you're just sharing files via http. We however share via rsync. Either way, this is outside PMS- this is a custom tree implementation (and a server side mod), you need to go talk to individual PM implementers to get them to experiment/do it.
