I am writing an automated gentoo deployment system which will be used to deploy 100s of hosts. I have a seed machine which builds binary packages. The packages are transferred to the portage directory on the new host in the build process. Emerge is correctly using the packages on the local machine. The problem is: the installation process takes twice as long as it should. We are currently using Debian in our production environment, which installs in 5 1/2 minutes. The gentoo installation at first took over 3 times as long. I gzipped the stage3 and portage tarballs instead of bzip2, and with the local package cache, I was able to reduce the installation time to 10 minutes. This is still way too long. I suspect that the time it takes to install the approximately 300 MB of bzipped packages is causing the delay. BZIP2 is known to be 6-10 times slower than gzip. I would like to be able to create and use packages compressed with gzip. I figured there would be an easy way to do this in the portage python source. I found that the xpak library handles appending gentoo specific data to the end of the archive. I figured there would be some variable controlling the program used to compress/decompress the archive. However, it seems bzip2 and the file extension is hardcoded in multiple places. What was the reasoning behind this decision to hardcode the compression utility? Is there an easy way to change it? Is there a more complicated way to change it? My company is possibly willing to do the programming if we had some guidance. Do you think this could be useful to others? Ross Capdeville Sr. Systems Engineer
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 142579 ***
