Bug 208338 – Idea: Dependency cache for faster dependency calculation

• Product: Portage Development
• Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

[Description Arne Babenhauserheide 2008-01-31 19:15:30 UTC]

Hi, 

Would it be possible (and useful) to cache the dependencies of ebuilds to get faster dependency calculation? 

That way, portage wouldn't have to check the whole ebuild information, but only if the avaible versions and the useflags of each dependency have changed from the last check. 

This could especially speed up dependency checking for ebuilds where I just set a version to testing. 
With a dependency cache, portage would only really need to check, for which ebuilds the keywords changed, and if anything else changed, but wouldn't have to check each ebuild again. 

As a last comment: I don't know much about the inner workings of portage, except that which I got from the wiki and 3 years of portage usage, so this idea might just be impossible to implement or not very useful. 

I hope it is useful, though. 

Best wishes, and many thanks for portage! 
Arne

Reproducible: Always

[Comment 1 Bo Ørsted Andresen (RETIRED) 2008-01-31 22:40:35 UTC]

(In reply to comment #0)
> Would it be possible (and useful) to cache the dependencies of ebuilds to get
> faster dependency calculation? 
[...]
> As a last comment: I don't know much about the inner workings of portage,
> except that which I got from the wiki and 3 years of portage usage, so this
> idea might just be impossible to implement or not very useful. 

If you go to metadata/cache in your rsync checkout (usually in /usr/portage) you'll find a cache which contains metadata (this includes *DEPEND) for all ebuilds in the tree... So yes, it's useful.. It has also existed for years..

[Comment 2 Arne Babenhauserheide 2008-01-31 23:45:54 UTC]

I could have expected that much... sorry, that I took your time. 

And many thanks for your answer! 

It's good to see again how advanced portage is.