Re: [gentoo-user] Automatically make backups of removed packages

[Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
>
> is there any global option (eg. make.conf) to tell portage always
> to do backups of uninstalled or overwritten packages ?

If you mean binary backup, you can enable buildpkg in FEATURES and
wait for next+1 updates, then you'll have binary package of current
and previous version...

If you just want to know what was previously installed, but don't mind
recompiling, you can use the "demerge" package, which saves state and
allows you to revert to a previous state (emerge back to exact package
versions that were installed at a certain date and time). It can also
use binary packages if they are available (when used alongside
buildpkg for example).

There are also commands to create binpkg of an already-installed
package, if you have specific times you want this but not all of the
time.