* Re: [gentoo-dev] general questions and thoughts on Gentoo
2002-01-28 15:54 [gentoo-dev] general questions and thoughts on Gentoo Mirian Crzig Lennox
@ 2002-01-28 9:11 ` Dan Armak
2002-01-28 16:19 ` Paul de Vrieze
2002-01-28 17:29 ` Tod M. Neidt
2 siblings, 0 replies; 5+ messages in thread
From: Dan Armak @ 2002-01-28 9:11 UTC (permalink / raw
To: gentoo-dev
On Monday 28 January 2002 17:54, you wrote:
> Another thing I kind of miss from other package systems is the
> ability to know *before* I download a package what files it will
> install. The Mandrake, Debian, and FreeBSD ports collection provide
> this information in various forms, which I've gotten used to, but
> the /usr/portage hierarchy doesn't seem to store it anywhere.
As other people said, this can be dependant on your USE flags. However, as
you may know, the emerge command can be split into several ebuild commands
(see man ebuild). So you can ebuild compile install, look at
/var/tmp/portage/<package>/image, and ebuild qmerge to complete the emerge.
Hope that idea helps,
--
Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux Developer, Desktop Team (KDE)
Matan, Israel
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 5+ messages in thread
* [gentoo-dev] general questions and thoughts on Gentoo
@ 2002-01-28 15:54 Mirian Crzig Lennox
2002-01-28 9:11 ` Dan Armak
` (2 more replies)
0 siblings, 3 replies; 5+ messages in thread
From: Mirian Crzig Lennox @ 2002-01-28 15:54 UTC (permalink / raw
To: gentoo-dev
Greetings all...
I'm a newcomer to Gentoo (although I've been a Linux users since 1994),
and spent an extremely enjoyable weekend installing it. I must say, I'm
very impressed -- this is what Slackware should have become: a
wizard-level distribution totally geared to the expert who wants total
control over the system. Plus, the up-to-date-ness of the source
packages was a refreshing change from most other distributions I have
used.
Some thoughts I had as I was playing with portage:
When using portage, it's often the case that I know the name of the
package I want to install, but not what category it lives in. Under
debian, for example, I could say "apt-get install zsh" to install
zsh, whereas in gentoo, I seem to have to remember that zsh lives in
app-shells. This seems unnecessarily inconvenient, since it would
only be an issue if the same package name were used by more than one
package in more than one group.
Another thing I kind of miss from other package systems is the
ability to know *before* I download a package what files it will
install. The Mandrake, Debian, and FreeBSD ports collection provide
this information in various forms, which I've gotten used to, but
the /usr/portage hierarchy doesn't seem to store it anywhere.
There are a few utilities which seem to be lacking, but which it
would appear to be trivial to add. Something like RPM's "rpm -qf
<file>" facility to find out which package "owns" a particular file
would be useful. This information is in the /var/db/pkg hierarchy,
so some kind of 'find&grep' method is all that's needed.
I've noticed that much of the "guts" of portage is written in
Python, which is a language I deeply respect and which certainly
makes sense for this kind of application, but which is not my
personal preference as a scripting language. However, it looks as
though all the Python code is confined to /usr/lib/portage; none of
the actual .ebuild scripts use Python. Is this a deliberate choice,
and if so, does this leave the door open for people wishing to
access portage from other languages, such as Ruby or Scheme?
Finally, given that Gentoo is designed to be compiled from source at
install means that it should be fairly portable to other
architectures. Has anyone tried installing Gentoo on a non-i386
architecture? I wouldn't mind giving it a shot on my PPC-based
iBook (currently running YellowDog 2.1).
Anyway... these are just random thoughts... in the main, I'm really
happy and impressed with Gentoo. Excellent work, everyone!
--Mirian
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 5+ messages in thread
* Re: [gentoo-dev] general questions and thoughts on Gentoo
2002-01-28 15:54 [gentoo-dev] general questions and thoughts on Gentoo Mirian Crzig Lennox
2002-01-28 9:11 ` Dan Armak
@ 2002-01-28 16:19 ` Paul de Vrieze
2002-01-28 16:28 ` Leo Lipelis
2002-01-28 17:29 ` Tod M. Neidt
2 siblings, 1 reply; 5+ messages in thread
From: Paul de Vrieze @ 2002-01-28 16:19 UTC (permalink / raw
To: gentoo-dev
On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Mirian Crzig Lennox wrote:
> When using portage, it's often the case that I know the name of the
> package I want to install, but not what category it lives in. Under
> debian, for example, I could say "apt-get install zsh" to install
> zsh, whereas in gentoo, I seem to have to remember that zsh lives in
> app-shells. This seems unnecessarily inconvenient, since it would
> only be an issue if the same package name were used by more than one
> package in more than one group.
Write a patch to emerge that does this, and submit it on bugs.gentoo.org
;-).
> Another thing I kind of miss from other package systems is the
> ability to know *before* I download a package what files it will
> install. The Mandrake, Debian, and FreeBSD ports collection provide
> this information in various forms, which I've gotten used to, but
> the /usr/portage hierarchy doesn't seem to store it anywhere.
You can check which packages are going to be installed with the --pretend
option to emerge. A file list is not available from the ebuilds for the
following reason: There is absolutely no way to know this because the
installed files depend on your systems actual configuration. It should be
possible to extract this information from a binary package though.
> There are a few utilities which seem to be lacking, but which it
> would appear to be trivial to add. Something like RPM's "rpm -qf
> <file>" facility to find out which package "owns" a particular file
> would be useful. This information is in the /var/db/pkg hierarchy,
> so some kind of 'find&grep' method is all that's needed.
Look at the app-admin/gentool package, it provides qpkg which should do
exactly that (among others)
> Finally, given that Gentoo is designed to be compiled from source at
> install means that it should be fairly portable to other
> architectures. Has anyone tried installing Gentoo on a non-i386
> architecture? I wouldn't mind giving it a shot on my PPC-based
> iBook (currently running YellowDog 2.1).
For the most part it should work, I think you should be carefull with
kernel patches, and the bootloader, but if the particular packages support
the architecture, it should work (Linux is linux). I would say, give it a
try (on a spare partition if possible).
By the way, as you would guess, the cd will not work, so you would need to
find out a way to do the bootstrapping without most of the initial system.
(It should also possible to regenerate the cd for ppc on your yellowdog)
Good luck,
Paul
--
___
/~~~\ | Paul de Vrieze
| O-O | | Student of information management and technology
| _ | | Mail: Paul@devrieze.net
\___/ | Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 5+ messages in thread
* Re: [gentoo-dev] general questions and thoughts on Gentoo
2002-01-28 16:19 ` Paul de Vrieze
@ 2002-01-28 16:28 ` Leo Lipelis
0 siblings, 0 replies; 5+ messages in thread
From: Leo Lipelis @ 2002-01-28 16:28 UTC (permalink / raw
To: gentoo-dev
On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 05:19:44PM +0100, Paul de Vrieze wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Mirian Crzig Lennox wrote:
>
> > There are a few utilities which seem to be lacking, but which it
> > would appear to be trivial to add. Something like RPM's "rpm -qf
> > <file>" facility to find out which package "owns" a particular file
> > would be useful. This information is in the /var/db/pkg hierarchy,
> > so some kind of 'find&grep' method is all that's needed.
>
> Look at the app-admin/gentool package, it provides qpkg which should do
> exactly that (among others)
Just a small correction: it should be app-admin/gentoolkit.
--Leo
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 5+ messages in thread
* Re: [gentoo-dev] general questions and thoughts on Gentoo
2002-01-28 15:54 [gentoo-dev] general questions and thoughts on Gentoo Mirian Crzig Lennox
2002-01-28 9:11 ` Dan Armak
2002-01-28 16:19 ` Paul de Vrieze
@ 2002-01-28 17:29 ` Tod M. Neidt
2 siblings, 0 replies; 5+ messages in thread
From: Tod M. Neidt @ 2002-01-28 17:29 UTC (permalink / raw
To: gentoo-dev
On Mon, 2002-01-28 at 09:54, Mirian Crzig Lennox wrote:
>
> When using portage, it's often the case that I know the name of the
> package I want to install, but not what category it lives in. Under
> debian, for example, I could say "apt-get install zsh" to install
> zsh, whereas in gentoo, I seem to have to remember that zsh lives in
> app-shells. This seems unnecessarily inconvenient, since it would
> only be an issue if the same package name were used by more than one
> package in more than one group.
pkgsearch <foo>
will return <category>/<foo> for you.
It is found in /usr/lib/portage/bin
> Another thing I kind of miss from other package systems is the
> ability to know *before* I download a package what files it will
> install. The Mandrake, Debian, and FreeBSD ports collection provide
> this information in various forms, which I've gotten used to, but
> the /usr/portage hierarchy doesn't seem to store it anywhere.
knowing before hand would be a little tough, because what is installed
can be dependent on *your* personal USE settings. After install you can
find this info in /var/db/pkg/<category>/<foo>/CONTENTS
> There are a few utilities which seem to be lacking, but which it
> would appear to be trivial to add. Something like RPM's "rpm -qf
> <file>" facility to find out which package "owns" a particular file
> would be useful. This information is in the /var/db/pkg hierarchy,
> so some kind of 'find&grep' method is all that's needed.
Like the other replies have said, emerge app-admin/gentoolkit
will give you several convenient scripts including qpkg, epm, and
etc-update.
> I've noticed that much of the "guts" of portage is written in
> Python, which is a language I deeply respect and which certainly
> makes sense for this kind of application, but which is not my
> personal preference as a scripting language. However, it looks as
> though all the Python code is confined to /usr/lib/portage; none of
> the actual .ebuild scripts use Python. Is this a deliberate choice,
> and if so, does this leave the door open for people wishing to
> access portage from other languages, such as Ruby or Scheme?
Unless, you want to hack the guts of portage, python coding isn't
necessary. Ebuilds are bash with the addition of convenient bash helper
scripts found in /usr/lib/portage/bin and are designed to be not very
different from a typical ./configure, make, make install sequence for a
manual installation from source.
>
> Finally, given that Gentoo is designed to be compiled from source at
> install means that it should be fairly portable to other
> architectures. Has anyone tried installing Gentoo on a non-i386
> architecture? I wouldn't mind giving it a shot on my PPC-based
> iBook (currently running YellowDog 2.1).
There have been rumors of a successful port to ppc on #gentoo.
Package patching was required, IIRC
TheMadHatter where are you!?!??!
tod
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 5+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2002-01-28 21:16 UTC | newest]
Thread overview: 5+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2002-01-28 15:54 [gentoo-dev] general questions and thoughts on Gentoo Mirian Crzig Lennox
2002-01-28 9:11 ` Dan Armak
2002-01-28 16:19 ` Paul de Vrieze
2002-01-28 16:28 ` Leo Lipelis
2002-01-28 17:29 ` Tod M. Neidt
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox