A better ebuild workflow with pure git and pkgcheck

Many developers today continue using repoman commit as their primary way of committing to Gentoo. While this tool was quite helpful, if not indispensable in times of CVS, today it’s a burden. The workflow using a single serial tool to check your packages and commit to them is not very efficient. Not only it wastes your time and slows you down — it discourages you from splitting your changes into more atomic commits.

Upon hearing the pkgcheck advocacy, many developers ask whether it can commit for you. It won’t do that, that’s not its purpose. Not only it’s waste of time to implement that — it would actually make it a worse tool. With its parallel engine pkgcheck really shines when dealing with multiple packages — forcing it to work on one package is a waste of its potential.

Rather than trying to proliferate your bad old habits, you should learn how to use git and pkgcheck efficiently. This post aims to give you a few advices.

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Improving distfile mirror structure

The Gentoo distfile mirror network is essential in distributing sources to our users. It offloads upstream download locations, improves throughput and reliability, guarantees distfile persistency.

The current structure of distfile mirrors dates back to 2002. It might have worked well back when we mirrored around 2500 files but it proved not to scale well. Today, mirrors hold almost 70 000 files, and this number has been causing problems for mirror admins.

The most recent discussion on restructuring mirrors started in January 2015. I have started the preliminary research in January 2017, and it resulted in GLEP 75 being created in January 2018. With the actual implementation effort starting in October 2019, I’d like to summarize all the data and update it with fresh statistics.

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