[GLLUG] Gentoo Portage Question

[Matt Graham]

On Thursday 11 November 2004 12:23, after a long battle with technology, 
Brian Hoort wrote:
> I'm a complete G2 noob.

G2?  There isn't anything on gentoo.org's site forums about G2.

> As part of installation from Universal CD, I copied the whole portage 
> tree to HDD, hence, it's full.  I want to delete most if not all of 
> it, since I'm not even using the majority of those packages.  Is it 
> safe to just: 
>   # rm /var/portage (I forget path, is that it?)

Did you mean /var/tmp/portage/ ?  There's a lot of stuff in there, but 
it's mostly directories with 1 file in them.  Disk space used is... 
481M here, larger than I'd expected.  I think you 
meant /usr/portage/distfiles/ , the directory where portage keeps the 
downloaded source tarballs of everything you've installed.  You can 
remove everything in there, but you'll probably have to re-download 
many things the next time you "emerge world".

> or is there some
>   # emerge --clearportage
> flag that I can't find anywhere in the docs or man emerge?

There is no way to remove old and superseded package files and 
directories from /var/tmp/portage or /usr/portage/distfiles 
automatically AFAICT.  ISTR a thread or 3 on the Gentoo forums about 
some scripts that people had written, but that's it.  "Autoclean" or 
"clean distfiles" might be good search terms to try out.  HTH,

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