List of available binary packages

[tckosvic]

After another update that has been running for more than 24 hrs using 5 cpus on an i7 chip, I am going to use binaries. Running update includes qtwebengine (with more than 30000 compilations) and libreoffice, and others.

I think the documentation of how to move to binaries is very well done. I believe I can implement it.

Beforehand, though, I would like to find a list of what packages are available as binaries. Can't seem to find info on where to look at the binary repo.

Any info? thanks, tom kosvic

[asturm]

I can't really answer with a specific number or way to look it up, but afaik it should be equivalent to the amount of stable packages.

[tckosvic]

Ok, so all packages are available as binaries. I got the impression from reading that only select packages were available as binaries.

So if I activate binary repo universally then all packages will load as binaries. Then, I would setup to only activate binaries on the packages that give me extended update times and recompile all others.

thanks, tom kosvic

[tckosvic]

The article

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Binary_Host_Quickstart

pretty clearly states that some packages, not all, are available as binaries. I knew I had read that someplace

[logrusx]

Setup the binhost.repo and run your emerge update command adding g and v to the switches. Of course p or a so you can take as much time as you want inspecting the output. At the end you'll see a list of packages which cannot be merged due to use incompatibility along with suggestions what can be changed to accommodate them.

Most of the packages are available. Packages like firefox that have a -bin equivalent are not, for obvious reasons. If you're interested in particular package you can browse the URL that you put in binrepos.conf or just issue an emerge -pvg command for it to see if it's available. I believe your concern is packages like before-mentioned qtwebengine. They are mostly available but you might need to change your use configuration and live with some compromises.

One detail worth mentioning is when using binary packages, the build-time dependencies will not be installed. That's why you may be surprised either at depclean or when running regular update after one with binary packages. In the case of deplcean you need to add --with-bdeps=n if I remember correctly, in the case of a regular update, you decide what to do.

Best Regards,
Georgi

[pjp]

You could browse a mirror to see what's there...

releases/amd64/binpackages/23.0/x86-64/

Doesn't the Packages file contain (in part) the available packages?

[eschwartz]

[logrusx]

[nikodll]

So far, it does not look very good for the bin packages availability. The very first package I wanted to install on a fresh system is of course the Midnight Commander (app-misc/mc), and there was no binary package for it. Not with the right set of USE flags, simply NONE, no packages for mc. My impression if you really want to be able to merge most of you packages from binaries the Gentoo-based Calculate Linux is still preferred.
_________________
Gentoo people

[eschwartz]

[logrusx]

[Zucca]

[eschwartz]

[pjp]

[logrusx]

[nikodll]

Maybe I was not expressing myself very clear, but my point is that there is no binary package for app-misc/mc available. Regardless of your USE-flag settings. And because MC is such a popular and widely used app, I consider this something that can be improved in the future for a better binary installation support.

Also, this is my first attempt (and quite successful after all, actually) to install Gentoo from binaries, so I may have missed something. I believe the mc package is entirely missing, because the corresponding dir on the file mirror is absent (e.g.: https://mirror.leaseweb.com/gentoo/releases/amd64/binpackages/23.0/x86-64/app-misc/ ), as well as because portage doesn't complain / offer different set of USE-flags for it. Sorry if I am wrong, feel free to educate me on how binary packages are resolved.
_________________
Gentoo people

[logrusx]

[Zucca]

[psycho]

Is it only the size/time of package compilation that matters? I was thinking perhaps they could help with broken systems... am updating an ancient one (old profile and many hundreds of outdated packages) and was seriously tempted (when I saw the massive piles of conflicts and other issues) to try updating world with all the available binaries just so that they'd already be in place to resolve problems before attempting compilation. Fortunately it turned out to be pretty straightforward to resolve all the issues just by fixing a dozen or so key ones... it's happily building update 103 of 830 as I type this... but couldn't binaries be useful to push through circular deps etc.?

Maybe not, I don't think I've used the binary repos myself yet so don't know... but if binaries can be useful in that way then maybe it's not unreasonable to suggest that a comprehensive binary repo (with all the stable packages, regardless of size) could be useful even if many of the packages have trivial compile times. In fact I'd have thought that going systematically through the stable tree building everything would be easier to automate than figuring out what to build and what to skip. I don't know: all I know is that the binaries give me a sense of security that I can potentially fix an urgently needed package without restoring from a backup... I'm much more concerned with stability and resilience to updates than with compilation times.

[logrusx]

[pjp]

[eschwartz]