Greetings,

How can I find out whether a particular Gentoo binary package is available?

I'm trying to engineer a slightly reduced KDE Plasma system in parallel, or rather interleaved, with my current system. Central to this is avoiding having to compile qtwebengine and webkit-gtk locally, and a few others too like llvm- core/*.

My method is to save the current system to external backup, then restore the partly complete new system and continue installing packages. It would be helpful to know in advance whether I'm likely to make progress, before I
start. Yesterday there was no current qtwebengine binpkg, so I had to give up for the day.

Secondly, what is the life expectancy of any given binpkg, storage capacity being finite?

--
Regards,
Peter.

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On 5/7/25 6:29 AM, Peter Humphrey wrote:

Greetings,

How can I find out whether a particular Gentoo binary package is available?

I'm trying to engineer a slightly reduced KDE Plasma system in parallel, or rather interleaved, with my current system. Central to this is avoiding having
to compile qtwebengine and webkit-gtk locally, and a few others too like llvm-
core/*.

My method is to save the current system to external backup, then restore the partly complete new system and continue installing packages. It would be helpful to know in advance whether I'm likely to make progress, before I start. Yesterday there was no current qtwebengine binpkg, so I had to give up
for the day.

By default (unless you pass an explicit --binpkg-respect-use argument),
portage will warn you when it rejects a binpkg which is incompatible
with your system, and tell you what USE flags you could change if you
wanted to get a valid binpkg match. There are definitely some binpkgs
for qtwebengine, depending on which USE flags you need (or are willing
to compromise on).

It may take up to a day for binpkgs to appear after a new version hits
stable. Our scheduled jobs start once a day at 9:11 AM UTC and build
whatever version is the default at that time.

Days with lots of updates can mean a delay in binaries being built. A
few days ago I improved this to incrementally upload packages once per
hour instead of only at the very end.

Secondly, what is the life expectancy of any given binpkg, storage capacity being finite?

Packages are *only* removed by running eclean-pkg with the defaults.
This means that packages are only removed once the ebuild that built it
has been deleted from the ::gentoo repository.


--
Eli Schwartz

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On Wednesday, 7 May 2025 16:45:07 British Summer Time Eli Schwartz wrote:

8

By default (unless you pass an explicit --binpkg-respect-use argument), portage will warn you when it rejects a binpkg which is incompatible
with your system, and tell you what USE flags you could change if you
wanted to get a valid binpkg match. There are definitely some binpkgs
for qtwebengine, depending on which USE flags you need (or are willing
to compromise on).

It may take up to a day for binpkgs to appear after a new version hits stable. Our scheduled jobs start once a day at 9:11 AM UTC and build
whatever version is the default at that time.

Yes, that's what was happening: portage couldn't use the then existing binpkg because of a USE flag change. I wanted to avoid the laborious process I described, whence the question.

Days with lots of updates can mean a delay in binaries being built. A
few days ago I improved this to incrementally upload packages once per
hour instead of only at the very end.

Good work!

Secondly, what is the life expectancy of any given binpkg, storage
capacity being finite?

Packages are *only* removed by running eclean-pkg with the defaults.
This means that packages are only removed once the ebuild that built it
has been deleted from the ::gentoo repository.

That /is/ good to know. Thanks Eli.

--
Regards,
Peter.

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