On Sun, 30 Nov 2008 09:25:51 -0700
Joe Peterson <lavajoe@g.o> wrote:

> Bottom line here is that there is extremely valuable and critical info
> in our emerge output.  In a way, these messages are like
> Gentoo-specific READMEs (or release notes and/or install
> instructions).  However, it is not saved for a user to use as a
> resource later (well, except that it is partially saved in the master
> emerge.log, but that's not quite useful enough).  There is no
> "official" place to go to look for Gentoo
> instructions; /usr/share/doc is one logical place, but it only
> contains files actually installed, not the notes output by emerge
> (and these are usually upstream-supplied, not Gentoo).
> 
> I propose that, upon merging a package, we save the emerge messages in
> either: 1) a package-specific file that resides somewhere "official"
> or
> 2) in the portage DB, so that the messages can be re-read via a
> portage utility.  In the latter case, either a new option to "equery"
> or a new "q" command (e.g. "equery readme <pkg>" or "qreadme <pkg>"
> could retrieve the text).

By default, messages generated by elog, ewarn and eerror are recorded
in /var/log/portage/elog/summary.log (emerge.log is just a
transaction log, so best to ignore it here). einfo isn't recorded on
purpose as it isn't intended for important information (that's the
purpose of elog). There are some tools available to simplify reading
these messages, and there several additional/alternative delivery
modules available (by mail, IM or in package specific files),
customizable via POTAGE_ELOG_* variables. Don't know if you just
haven't been aware of this, or if you're asking for something
completely different.

Marius