I propose a change to the portage system, more notably the invoking of fixpackages. It would be nice to have the possibility to not run fixpackages on every emerge, but instead have a binary package fixed only if and when it is actually going to be emerged. For those that do not use binary packages, it would mean that they never use fixpackages. For those that do, it would save a lot of processing time. Such users tend to create binary packages by default, and lots of them get never used. Though I'm not too familiar with the internals of portage, I guess that it should not be too difficult to implement. Fixpackages would have to be run only on an emerge -k, and only on the packages to be extracted. Also, it should not be invoked when the -p switch is added. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
I support this idea. Consider my vote for it.
That doesn't work. Portage cannot take care of packages at that level. fixpackages corrects all the metadata within a tbz2 to ensure that it is valid for the current portage tree. It's not much help if it is randomly out of date. Determining exactly where a package has become out of date is well beyond trivial and it's a bit too complicated internally to warrant dealing with it that way.
