Bug 760321 – Misleading Gentoo Handbook explanation of where Gentoo repository should be located

• Product: Documentation
• Status: RESOLVED UPSTREAM

[Description [e-mail] 2020-12-16 15:32:35 UTC]

The subsubsection "How many partitions and how big?" of the Subsection "Designing a partition scheme" of Section "Introduction to block devices" of the Gentoo AMD64 Handbook reads: "In most situations, /usr/ is to be kept big: not only will it contain the majority of applications, it typically also hosts the Gentoo ebuild repository (by default located at /var/db/repos/gentoo) which already takes around 650 MiB."

This is completely misleading as to where the Gentoo ebuild repository should be located. At least, it raises the following questions:
1. Does the Gentoo ebuild repository default location
is /var/db/repos/gentoo but virtually everybody relocate it to /usr/ during
the installation process?
2. Why not change its default location to /usr/ in this case?

I have asked these questions on gentoo-user mailing list and got the answer that the Gentoo ebuild repository was historically in /usr/portage, it's now in /var/db/repos/gentoo.

Moreover, I was told that the handbook maintainers would appreciate a patch or a
bug. So, I decided to check if it indeed so. :)

In my view, if the explanation above was correct, the quoted phrase should be re-formulated to completely exclude any mention of the Gentoo ebuild repository as irrelevant, for example, as follows: "In most situations, /usr/ is to be kept big as it contains the majority of applications."

[Comment 1 Sam James 2020-12-27 22:48:54 UTC]

I think this may belong on a talk page of the wiki, right?

[Comment 2 Jonas Stein 2021-01-03 14:26:54 UTC]

moved it there
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook_Talk:AMD64/Installation/Disks#Gentoo_ebuild_repository_default_location

[Comment 3 Matthew Marchese 2021-01-04 19:13:46 UTC]

Thank you Jonas for posting upstream and thank you [e-mail] for the bug.

This section has been majorly rewritten to be accurate to the (relatively new) default Gentoo ebuild location under /var/.

New edit diff can be found here: https://wiki.gentoo.org/index.php?title=Handbook:Parts/Blocks/DesigningPartitionScheme&diff=prev&oldid=917809

[Comment 4 [e-mail] 2021-01-07 17:42:00 UTC]

(In reply to Matthew Marchese from comment #3)
> 
> This section has been majorly rewritten to be accurate to the (relatively
> new) default Gentoo ebuild location under /var/.

Thank you for addressing the issue. The changed description looks good.