damnsmallportage.sh

The current Portage Tree is over several hundret megabytes in size, so syncing, especially with a low-speed internet connections takes forever.

A solution would be, to reduce your Portage Tree. With rsync_excludes you cann tell portage to only copy ebuilds for packages which are installed on your system. So, here's what we do.

Install Gentoolkit

The gentoolkit package is a prerequisite. Install it.

emerge gentoolkit -av

Now we have to edit our /etc/make.conf file. We're loocking for PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS and modify it:

# PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS can be used to feed additional options to the rsync
#     command used by `emerge --sync`. This will not change the default options
#     which are set by PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS (don't change those unless you know
#     exactly what you're doing).
PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS="--exclude-from=/etc/portage/rsync_excludes
 --delete-excluded --delete-before"

Save and close your editor

DamnSmallPortage Script

The next step is to create a adapted version of our /etc/portage/rsync_excludes. To do this, we use our little script:

nano /root/damnsmallportage.sh

Copy&Paste:

#!/bin/sh
#
#    Copyright (c) 2006-2026 by Michael Hampicke
#    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
#    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
#    (at your option) any later version.
#
#    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#    GNU General Public License for more details.
#
#    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
#    along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
#    Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301  USA

set -e

command -v equery >/dev/null || { echo "equery not found, emerge app-portage/gentoolkit" >&2; exit 1; }

pkgs=$(equery -q list -F '$cp' '*' | sort -u)
[ -n "$pkgs" ] || { echo "no installed packages found" >&2; exit 1; }

{
    echo "$pkgs" | sed 's|^|+ /|'
    echo "- /*-*/*"
    echo "- /virtual/*"
    echo "$pkgs" | sed 's|.*|+ /metadata/md5-cache/&-[0-9]*|'
    echo "- /metadata/md5-cache/*/*"
    echo "- /licenses/*"
} > rsync_excludes

Now it's time to run damnsmallportage:

sh ./damnsmallportage.sh

and copy the created rsync_excludes to /etc/portage

mv rsync_excludes /etc/portage/

Reduce Portage Tree

Only thing left is syncing

emerge --sync

In this step, all unnecessary ebuilds are going to be erased. After that, our tree is extremly small
This is my Damn Smapp Portage Tree

du -sh /usr/portage/
39M /usr/portage/

Known problems

If you wan't to emerge a package, which is not in your small Portage tree, e.g. nano, you'll get this error:

emerge nano
Calculating dependencies
emerge: there are no ebuilds to satisfy "nano".

What we have todo, is to edit /etc/portage/rsync_excludes and add the missing package at the very top of the file.

+ app-editors/nano
+ metadata/cache/app-editors/nano

A list of all current ebuilds in the official tree can be found on http://www.gentoo-portage.com/
Now do another emerge --sync and let's try it again:

# emerge nano -v

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild R ] app-editors/nano-1.3.11-r2

Total size of downloads: 1,145 kB

If for some reason you need the complete tree an your system, just comment out the PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS part in /etc/make.conf:

#PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS="--exclude-from=/etc/portage/rsync_excludes
  --delete-excluded"

damnsmallportage.sh

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