I propose adding a estimated completion time to portage. It would work in the following manner: (I largely give credit to the folks at Linux From Scratch <www.linuxfromscratch.org>) When a Gentoo system is first built we select one package (or create one for the purpose) where we measure the time of the compile and use that as our base time unit. If the system is already built then we just re-emerge that package. We could use Bash like LFS does, a different package, or create one with all sorts of crazy code just to eat up compile time so we get a good heuristic. The resulting time unit would be recorded somewhere in the system and all package compile times would be expressed in that unit. Each architecture for each ebuild would have a different time measurement, and package maintainer would just time their builds. Of course different USE flags settings and such would change things, but its meant to be an ESTIMATION not a exact thing. I (Eoin Coffey) would of course be willing to hack on this feature if it gets 'official' Gentoo blessing. Thanks.
Way too many variables for it to be anywhere near accurate. For example: * USE Flags * CFLAGS * Compiler Version * Concurrent tasks There are more but that's all that immediately comes to mind. Also, history has shown that if we added it, we'd be getting bugs about it not being "perfect" enough. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 10365 ***
