Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo healthy?

[Alan McKinnon <alan@linuxholdings.co.za>]

On Wednesday 20 December 2006 21:09, Benno Schulenberg wrote:
> Mark Knecht wrote:
> > At that point it's gone. I cannot put into an overlay
> > what I don't have. Probably most frustrating has been that I
> > don't know it will be removed until it's been removed.
>
> You could, as soon as you have a system in a working state, tar up
> the entire /usr/portage tree, and then, when you find an upgrade
> has broken an essential package, untar the ball over your new tree,
> and re-emerge the old version of the package.  Once a month or so,
> when you find that also the newest tree gives you a working system,
> you would tar up that /usr/portage instead and remove the old one.
> This is the dead simple, brute force way, no overlay required.  :)

No, no, no that's waaaaaaaay too much work.

Archive a portage tree by all means. But if an ebuild is removed that a 
user want to keep, the solution is so simple it's amazing. Copy the 
ebuild to /usr/local/portage in the correct directory structure. I 
maintain my own enlightenment-17 ebuilds, so to start I did this:

mkdir -p /usr/local/portage/x11-wm
cp -ar /usr/portage/x11-wm/e /usr/local/portage/x11-wm

Run emerge. Simple as that. You might need to add an entry to 
package.mask so that portage won't use later versions in the main tree 
but that's all part of normal gentoo usage anyway

There's a howto on gentoo.org that explains this in great detail. Use 
it, it's the way portage let's you keep old stuff around.

alan
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