> 1. Emerge with a time delay, so that one can specify big emerge tasks > for say midnight for proper bandwidth usage etc. I know you can do this > with a combination of utilites (such as cron) but it would be neat to > have it as part of emerge.
This is not windows where every application includes the kitchen sink. Cron is the defacto method of scheduling tasks; any attempt to mimic cron functionality (or a subset thereof) means trying to maintain a code base for which a perfectly good tool already exists to handle. My systems perform their 'emerge --sync' steps via a cron task that I have scheduled to run at night; why try to rework that into portage somehow? And for emerge tasks that don't require a formal cron scheduling, 'at' works just as well to get them done. > 2. Background downloading, of packages while emerge compiles other > packages. For example when I am compiling something huge like GNome, > while a package like GTK is being compiled, emerge should be clever and > download the next package and save time. This, as well, can be handled via the same cron task used to 'emerge --sync'. Add an 'emerge --update --deep --fetchonly world' and you get all of the packages pre-downloaded and ready to build when you are prepared to update the system. Since I have multiple gentoo systems, I use http-replicator as the http proxy for portage; all of the systems hit the proxy for package files so I only have to perform the download from the net once to keep the entire internal network up to date. -- [email protected] mailing list
