Keep all tmp files downloaded while installing?

genewitch

For instance, there's a few copies of ffmpeg downloaded that are quite large. I am running through a bunch of my old hardware and setting up retropie to see how they work (like old mini PCs, old AMD machines with built in radeon HD cards, etc) and i have 6mbit internet, so i'd like to keep the tmp files that get deleted after the compilation and install are done. This way if i install a different OS (ubuntu 16.04 server instead of desktop, for instance) or reformat, or install on a different machine, i can just drop in the existing repo and only get the deltas from github.

To wit: my RetroPie-Setup directory, after a complete install is 7MB. During the install it went as high as 500MB (installing PSP emulator) - I'd like to keep all those git folders!

Thank you in advance. I searched here and github repo for 'tmp', 'temp', and 'temporary' with and without "keep files" etc. to no avail.

mitu

@genewitch The setup script - when building from source - will automatically download the sources to the tmp/build subfolder and then delete them after building. There isn't an option to keep the sources, however any git downloads are performed with the --depth 1 option, so only the most recent version of the repository will be downloaded. Most likely the size you're seeing (500 mb) is from the compiled objects, not from the source itself.

genewitch

the PSP emulator has to fetch quite a few libraries like ffmpeg, and before it actually goes through and compiles everything, the local clones are large, and then it wipes the local clones. I'm wondering how to fix that with a command switch. If not i can just wait for the clones to finish and control-C the installer and make a copy of the directories, i guess? or edit the scripts to not do clean-up.

Basically if i want to do 4 installs back to back on the same hardware to test different OS configurations, i don't want to have to redownload all those library sources.

Thanks for your reply!

BuZz

@genewitch experimental option - sudo __persistent_repos=1 ~/RetroPie-Setup/retropie_setup.sh

genewitch

@buzz thank you so much!

genewitch

to anyone else, this was added because of this thread on github
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/issues/1743