[gentoo-dev] Portage newbie needs help -- Please ignore the other one

[gentoo-dev] Portage newbie needs help -- Please ignore the other one

[Dominic Leland]

Sorry, I didn't realized my email program was sending html email. Didn't
quite translate well. Here's the text version:

Hi everyone,

I've been using Gentoo, off and on, since rc3 (I believe). When rc4-pre2
came out, I wanted to go head-first into it. Unfortunately, I always mess up
my system with portage. Back then, when I would update portage, my pkgmerge
would be broken. With almost no software installed (and not enough energy to
compile everything from source) I would reinstall and ignore portage.

Back when I first tried this, I read a post here on gentoo-dev saying that
the portage I was using was broken and would be fixed soon. I left Gentoo
alone for a while. I wanted to wait for rc5 and give portage a little more
time to develop.

With all of the documentation improvements and a few portage updates, I
decided to try it again. I still have a broken portage/pkgmerge, but I did
get a little further last time. Just to compare, I am going to list the
steps I took this time:

1.Install Gentoo according to the Installation guide. FYI, in case you want
to know, here's how my partitions are set up:
/dev/hda1    VFAT    ~25GB    Windows
/dev/hda2    VFAT    ~25GB    Windows (data)
/dev/hda3    reiserfs    150MB    /boot
/dev/hda4                   25GB    extended
/dev/hda5    reiserfs    4GB    /
/dev/hda6    swap       250MB

(I'm planning on following Daniel's article on LVM - I'm leaving a bunch of
unallocated space after the swap)

2.Downloaded the latest (I think) rsync.
3.Rsync'ed the portage tree.
4.ebuild portage-x.y.z.ebuild merge -- This part suprisingly worked - it
didn't last time.

Even though portage seemed to merge fine, it would always fail whenever I
would go into any other directory and try to do an "ebuild
package-x.y.z.ebuild merge." I kept getting a "package already installed -
unmerge first" error (even on things I knew weren't installed like
Gnome-1.4).

The document's next step, assuming ebuilding worked, was to unmerge the
existing file, but since I had just started my /var/db/pkg tree, I wouldn't
have entries for anything I was upgrading.

Since the last time I tried this seemed to break my pkgmerge, I tried to
merge some packages off of CDROM. Nope. I keep getting errors (something
like "index out of range").

I'm really anxious to get my system up and running and upgradable. I like
how the newer portage is recursive. Any help from the portage adepts is much
appreciated.

Thank you.

Dominic Leland

Re: [gentoo-dev] Portage newbie needs help -- Please ignore the other one

[Daniel Robbins]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2001 at 07:39:12PM -0700, Dominic Leland wrote:

> Since the last time I tried this seemed to break my pkgmerge, I tried to
> merge some packages off of CDROM. Nope. I keep getting errors (something
> like "index out of range").
> 
> I'm really anxious to get my system up and running and upgradable. I like
> how the newer portage is recursive. Any help from the portage adepts is much
> appreciated.

The new pkgmerge is designed for our "generation two" .tbz2 format, and doesn't
work with the earlier .tbz2 packages included with Gentoo Linux 1.0_rc4_pre2.
This means that before upgrading Portage to 1.5, you should pkgmerge everything
you need from the rc4_pre2 CD first.  After that, you'll need to do this to
install an rc4_pre2 package:

# cat pkg.tbz2 | bzip2 -d | tar xpvf - -C /

pre/post inst/rm scripts won't be called when using this simplified install, but
most packages don't have them and all will be well.

-- 
Daniel Robbins					<drobbins@gentoo.org>
President/CEO					http://www.gentoo.org 
Gentoo Technologies, Inc.			

Re: [gentoo-dev] Portage newbie needs help -- Please ignore the other one

[Daniel Robbins]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2001 at 07:39:12PM -0700, Dominic Leland wrote:

> Even though portage seemed to merge fine, it would always fail whenever I
> would go into any other directory and try to do an "ebuild
> package-x.y.z.ebuild merge." I kept getting a "package already installed -
> unmerge first" error (even on things I knew weren't installed like
> Gnome-1.4).
> 
> The document's next step, assuming ebuilding worked, was to unmerge the
> existing file, but since I had just started my /var/db/pkg tree, I wouldn't
> have entries for anything I was upgrading.

Portage *does* require that the ebuild you are attempting to merge is located
in a category directory.  So, doing an "ebuild /tmp/foo-1.0.ebuild merge" won't
work, but "ebuild /tmp/sys-apps/foo-1.0.ebuild merge" should.

As for the "package already installed" error, I'm not sure what's causing this.
You can always forcefully remove the appropriate db entry by typing:

# rm -rf /var/db/pkg/[cat]/[pkg] (replace [cat] and [pkg] with category and pkgname)

However, this "package already installed" error is *not* a Portage 1.5 error.
So maybe you have an old version of ebuild hanging around and causing problems.
After merging Portage-1.5, do an "rm /usr/bin/ebuild" (it now lives in
/usr/sbin).

Sorry about all the problems.  For what it's worth, with Portage 1.5, Portage
is quite stable and is working well for Achim and myself.  Whenever we find
bugs in Portage, I normally get them fixed within a few minutes of their
discovery -- worst case, I get to them within a day.  These days, I'm focusing
on minor ones rather than biggies like you're experiencing.  Hopefully, we can
get Gentoo Linux 1.0_rc5 on ibiblio before more people start experiencing problems
with the now-outdated 1.0_rc4_pre2 -- the transition from 1.0_rc4_pre2 to our
"current" version on CVS is quite difficult due to major changes in Portage.

Best Regards,

-- 
Daniel Robbins					<drobbins@gentoo.org>
President/CEO					http://www.gentoo.org 
Gentoo Technologies, Inc.