How much time needs Gentoo for updating the set @world?

Question

I have executed this command: emerge --ask --update --deep --newuse @world. It has been executed about a couple of hours and it is still installing things. Is it normal?

Answer 1

If you want to have more info about emerge building time, you could use app-portage/genlop. Genlop extracts useful information from the emerge logs and can do some estimations based on this info.

To see the current package which is compiling:

~$ genlop -c

Currently merging 2 out of 19

* sys-kernel/linux-firmware-20180103-r1 

      current merge time: 8 seconds.
      ETA: 1 minute and 13 seconds.

If you would want to know the estimated time from a complete emerge operation:

~ $ emerge -p app-office/libreoffice www-client/firefox | genlop -pq
These are the pretended packages: (this may take a while; wait...)

[ebuild   R   ~] www-client/firefox-60.0.1::gentoo  USE="[...]" 0 KiB
[ebuild   R    ] app-office/libreoffice-6.0.3.2::gentoo  USE="[...]" 0 KiB


Estimated update time: 2 hours, 27 minutes.

From genlop -h:

-p  estimate build time from a piped "emerge -p" output
-q  query gentoo.linuxhowtos.org database if no local emerge was found

Note, that when using the -q option, the actual build time can be quite off. This is because it relies on user information submitted to the gentoo.linuxhowtos.org database. This shouldn't matter when a previous version of the package was already emerge on the system, since it will be in the logs.

Answer 2

Yes, especially if you compile big application (Firefox, Chrome, or KDE) by yourself or if a heavily used library (libc, openssl, or libpng) has been updated (since all depending ports need to update).

Since all updated ports/packages need to be rebuild from source it might take sometime, especially if it has been a while since the last update.