On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 6:23 AM, Daiajo Tibdixious <daiajo@...> wrote:
> I know when I do an emerge world it looks at /var/lib/portage/world
> for the list of packages.
> I went looking for a 'system' list for the emerge system command & did
> not find it.
> I also looked in make.profile and didn't find anything likely.
> I also googled my query but got too many spurious matches.
> I'm sure there is a simple answer.
>
> I want to write a script that reads the system list, finds the
> binpkg's, and copies the latest to backup.
> I can do this easy for the world list.
> --
> Daiajo Tibdixious daiajo@...
>

With the newer versions of portage (2.2.x) you can do

emerge -pve @system

On my box it returned a result of 439 packages. Seems high, but...

You can temporarily move /var/lib/portage/world to some other name.
With the world file gone there's nothing to install to satisfy the
@world set. With this setup I did

emerge -pve @world

and got a result of 439 package, so at least there is agreement.

Now, I don't truly believe all of these 439 packages are necessary to
complete @system as my 32-bit Gentoo VM only has 174 packages in
@world.

Go figure, and don't forget to move the world file back again... ;-)

HTH,
Mark