Portage currently displays the size of a files to be downloaded when installing a package, which will be 0kb if the package files are already in the distfiles directory. I would like to suggest a new portage flag, possibly "--size" which shows how big a package is, whether it is already downloaded or not. So if the files are already in the distfiles directory it will query the file size and display the result. The reasoning for this suggestion is so that you can easily make an estimate as to how long a package or a list of packages will take to install. Whether you are just re-emergeing something or emerging updated packages where no new files have to be downloaded, eg. updating foo-1.0 to foo-1.0-r1. Below is an example of how it could work: #emerge -pv --size kdelibs [ebuild R ] kde-base/kdelibs-3.4.1-r1 +alsa -arts +cups -debug -doc -jpeg2k -kdeenablefinal +kerberos -openexr +spell +ssl +tiff -xinerama -zeroconf 0 kB Total size of downloads: 0 kB Total size of package: 16,458 kB
Not much for this unless we make some kind of on-the-fly metadata for it so it fits into the general metadata query code. Easy workaround for the moment: DISTDIR=/some/non-existant/dir emerge -pv bla
The size of the package doesn't always determine how long it will take to compile. I would suggest looking into the packages "splat" or "genlop" - I am not sure if you can do this with splat, but it was in the GWN about genlop - you can do something along the lines of "emerge -uD world -p | genlop --pretend" and it will give you an estimated time of compilation.
Thanks for your comments. I know that it is not vitally necessary and that it doesn't necessarily tell you how long something will compile, but I thought it might have been quite a trivial feature to add. I do use genlop and that does do the same thing more effectively. Thanks for letting me know about the DISTDIR=.. workaround, I never thought about doing that. You may as well set this bug to closed or wontfix now.
Putting a hold on feature requests for portage as they are drowning out the bugs. Most of these features should be available in the next major version of portage. But for the time being, they are just drowning out the major bugs and delaying the next version's progress. Any bugs that contain patches and any bugs for etc-update or dispatch-conf can be reopened. Sorry, I'm just not good enough with bugzilla. ;)
Emerge -s shows the desired value already.
