Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo healthy?

["Mark Knecht" <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On 12/21/06, Benno Schulenberg <benno.schulenberg@gmail.com> wrote:
> Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > 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, [...]
> >
> > No, no, no that's waaaaaaaay too much work.
>
> On the contrary, it's very little work: just a simple tar command.
> But the tarball will eat loads of disk space when not excluding
> distfiles.
>
> > 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 [...]
>
> But he can't: the ebuild is gone.  That is the case we're trying to
> solve here: he has emerged a newer version of a package, finds it
> doesn't work correctly, wants to go back to the previous version,
> but seess that that version is gone.  How to get it back?  One way
> is to get it from viewcvs on the net.  Another way is to keep a copy
> of all the ebuilds yourself.  It's a big waste of space, but it is
> simple, no searching on the web required.
>
> The best way, of course, is to use the binary package thing.  Mark:
> add EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="-b" to your /etc/make.conf.  This will
> tell emerge to also build a binary package for every package that
> you emerge.  Whenever you find that an upgrade of some package was
> unfortunate, do an  'emerge  -K  =package-x.y.z'  with the exact
> version number you want to restore, and done.  No manual tarring
> and untarring required, emerge does it all.
>
> Benno

Benno,
   Now that is an interesting solution, especially for my Myth boxes
which do not get touched for 6 months to 1 year. I've had problems
with Gentoo devs getting rid of older ati-drivers, mythtv to some
small extent ivtv a long time ago. Anyway, if binary packages were
built and stored in some reasonable location then I could probably
prune out things that I'm not worried about, like fluxbox, etc., but
keep the critical stuff like Myth, video drivers.

   I'll check it out, as well as Bo's FEATURES=buildpkg comment.

   I wonder if -b could be put in one of the /etc/portage/package.XXX
files so that it could be done every time for ejust specific packages?

   Thanks for the idea!

Cheers,
Mark
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