Re: [gentoo-user] First Portage Hick-up, Chokes on Java

["Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto" <please.no.spam.here@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 3:23 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 04 November 2008 16:16:30 Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto wrote:
>> collision-protect seems nice, but I don't know about its drawbacks (if
>> any), and since it seems not to be default and I don't have good
>> knowledge of it, I didn't change the default.
>
> You probably want this enabled. I think it's disabled by default because new
> users will have no idea whatsoever what to do about it. All it does is check
> the files it wants to install with what's on the disk. If there's a match,
> the existing files must only have been put there by the same package
> (ignoring version numbers).
>
> If there's a collision, you get a huge big fat error message and a chance to
> find out why two different packages install the same file. Maybe you need to
> uninstall one, maybe it doesn't matter. If it's the latter, just
>
> FEATURES="-collision-protect" emerge <package>
>
> and continue as normal. In any event, you get to decide what should happen.
> Every experienced gentoo user should be using this imho
>
Nice. I actually thought that this protection was enabled by default,
and wondered what FEATURES=collision-protect did. Once I had a program
behaving weirdly, and found out that its binary (/usr/bin/stream, if
memory serves) had been replaced by an identically-named binary of
another program. I thought it was a Portage bug, but you are telling
me that Portage allows this by default.

By the way, certain parts of Portage are very scarcely document, are
they not? For examples, the FEATURES only have quick explanations in
make.conf.example, as far as I know (and I did search for more
complete explanations).

-- 
Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds