Doing a command twice can be tedious (first command to fetch, second to emerge), especially if you have to edit it in a standard terminal or terminal emulator. For example. emerge --fetchonly =media-libs/libpng-1.2.8 =media-libs/freetype-2.1.9-r1 =x11-misc/ttmkfdir-3.0.9-r2 =media-libs/fontconfig-2.2.3 =x11-base/xorg-x11-6.8.2-r1 && emerge --buildpkgonly =media-libs/libpng-1.2.8 =media-libs/freetype-2.1.9-r1 =x11-misc/ttmkfdir-3.0.9-r2 =media-libs/fontconfig-2.2.3 =x11-base/xorg-x11-6.8.2-r1 (The above is a cut down real life example, for space reasons). If I realise I need to add something to that, I have to spend time going through a lot of text before I can add it in, and it's much harder in a real terminal without paste funcionality. Therefore I propose an argument to fetch files first then emerge in one command. For example: emerge --fetchfirst --buildpkgonly =media-libs/libpng-1.2.8 =media-libs/freetype-2.1.9-r1 =x11-misc/ttmkfdir-3.0.9-r2 =media-libs/fontconfig-2.2.3 =x11-base/xorg-x11-6.8.2-r1
No... use an alias or bash function. Don't see any benefit from this. emerge -f ~= just fetch. emerge -b ~= build pkgs, but just binpkg. They're kind of mutually exclusive ops...
