I was wondering about a function in Portage and had an idead. I sopke with seemant about it along with others. I wondered why you should have todo an rsync before you get an app to make sure it is the most current version. There were some pluses to the rsync because you can maintian your local portage tree as well as make changes to the builds. There might be others I am not thinking of because I am new to Portage. I was thinking that if you wanted to just grab a new app and not have todo the rsync process that a option could be added to emerge and it would just forward to the updated portage tree on the web and start from there. Skipping the rsync process. The benefit is for the users that just add a app and that is all they wanted at the moment with the ability to haveing knowing it was the most up to date app in the portage tree online. Also it might save a small amount of bandwidth on your servers because I think some of the people would just do the emerge with the web portage tree for an app here and there and not grab the whole list for thier needs. I am a portage newb and this was just an idea. Let me know what you think.
Along those lines an `emerge --check-web-for-updates world` could query against just your currently merged packages instead of the whole tree, and so on. Of course this gets into problems when the new packages have new dependancies which have updates as well. A possible solution is to just loop until no new updates from new dependancies are found, caveat is that this moves a higher load to the users' own DB. This holds big potential for bandwidth savings on both ends.
*** Bug 17406 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 51783 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
To actually implement basically a remote tree (querying, fetching, etc) would require a fair overhaul of portage. This would be glep material, since it would entail addition of a new tree type. If anyone is interested, take it up on the gentoo-dev mailing list, and reopen this bug. As is, no code, nor proposals, nor high priority (for me at least) :)