Question regarding "emerge"

[josolanes]

I was just thinking...can you emerge more than one thing at a time safely. I've learned that you can emerge more than one at a time (I do it often), but I was wondering if this could cause problems later on (portage tree problems maybe??...also, when portage is cleaning after one program is installed, could it cause problems with the other install?). I'm talking about two programs that have nothing (or very little) to do with each other (they don't have the same dependencies for example).

I do this because the hard drive and processor(s) don't seem to be doing a whole lot when emerging one program (openoffice in this specific case), so I decided to emerge another program in the meantime (firefox).

Just a random thought I had....now that I have my system up, I want to make sure I'm not doing something that could cause problems in the future.

[kastorff]

It's safe only if you can ensure both don't reach the "merge" part of the process simultaneously; which would be very difficult on an ongoing basis. You might get away with it by emerging something very big and something much smaller at the same time, but as a general practice it's a bad idea.

[josolanes]

It's safe only if you can ensure both don't reach the "merge" part of the process simultaneously; which would be very difficult on an ongoing basis. You might get away with it by emerging something very big and something much smaller at the same time, but as a general practice it's a bad idea.

okay, that makes sense. i won't do it very often...i just didn't want to wait for openoffice to emerge and not be able to emerge something else when i'm on a fresh install

thanks a lot for the response

[variant]

I dont like to disagree but it make no difference whatsoever if you merge one package at the same time as annother.

If you set FEATURES="distlocks" in /etc/make.conf then it wont merge the SAME package at the same time if you are merging somthing with the same dependancies.

I regulary setup lots of merges going at the same time and it has never cause a problem.

you can also emerge more than one package in a row by doing "emerge package1 package2 package3"

and so on (one command)

[josolanes]

I dont like to disagree but it make no difference whatsoever if you merge one package at the same time as annother.

If you set FEATURES="distlocks" in /etc/make.conf then it wont merge the SAME package at the same time if you are merging somthing with the same dependancies.

I regulary setup lots of merges going at the same time and it has never cause a problem.

you can also emerge more than one package in a row by doing "emerge package1 package2 package3"

and so on (one command)

hmm...i like this idea. i'll have to look into adding FEATURES="distlocks" as I don't like waiting for a package to compile/install when I could be installing something else (seems like a waste of time when I could be adding a couple at a time)

Would it be a bad idea to try and add that while portage is installing something? I'd assume so, but I'm not sure.

[variant]

no, you can add it now. It wont re-read the config (/etc/make.conf) untill the next emerge.

[josolanes]

no, you can add it now. It wont re-read the config (/etc/make.conf) untill the next emerge.

thanks a lot for the info!

this might speed this whole install process up a bit

[kastorff]

I dont like to disagree but it make no difference whatsoever if you merge one package at the same time as annother.

I'm sure I read that it was a bad thing...I'm thinking it was on the Gentoo board. Well if it works for you...experience always trumps browsing a forum.