[gentoo-dev] improving world & pkg

i've been using Gentoo for  6 mth  (Linux & UNIX much longer)
& am steadily learning how things are set up & work in practice.
i'ld like to make a couple of suggestions based on that experience.

(1) instead of Portage adding emerged pkgs to 'world' automatically,
it sb upto the user to ask for that to be done by an explicit flag.
i suspect present behaviour goes back to the beginnings of Gentoo
& has never been re-examined: it doesn't work out well in practice.
often, i find myself wanting to update a pgm wh is needed for something else,
but wh i don't want to add to my 'world', wh is the end-products i do want.
yes, you can explicitly exclude things w '--oneshot',
but that has to be done each time & has no short equivalent.

my suggestion is to replace '--oneshot' w its opposite '-w',
wh wd explicitly tell Portage to add the pkg to 'world';
otherwise, the pkg wd not be added to 'world'.

(2) 'qpkg -I' will list all emerged pkgs,
wh seem to be recorded in  /var/db/pkg/... (a set of dirs).
however, it wb really useful to have a simple file listing them,
wh wb updated at each emerge by Portage & cb annotated by the user.

i have created such a file for my own system.  the 1st few lines are:

           app-admin/addpatches-0.2 # for gentoo-sources
  W 031121 app-admin/chkrootkit-0.41-r1
    040212 app-admin/fam-2.7.0 # for kdelibs
  W 031128 app-admin/gkrellm-1.2.13
  W 040307 app-admin/gkrellm-2.1.25 # invoke 'gkrellm2'
    040322 app-admin/sudo-1.6.7_p5 # for postgresql
  S 040314 app-admin/sysklogd-1.4.1-r10
  S        app-arch/bzip2-1.0.2-r2
    031005 app-arch/cabextract-0.6 # CD1 for xfree
  S        app-arch/cpio-2.5
  S        app-arch/gzip-1.3.3-r2

the 1st col identifies it as world/system/other, the 2nd is the date,
then there is the full version name & lastly comments preceded by '#'.

my suggestion is that Portage shd create such a file at installation
-- eg  /etc/pkglist  -- , then update it whenever a pkg is emerged,
respecting the user's comments (anything on a line after '#').
wd this require more work than writing a simple script ?

the most important advantage of Gentoo over other distros
-- as shown by users' comments when asked why they prefer Gentoo --
is that it gives users real control over the shape of their systems.
both suggestions shd add something to that feeling of control.

-- 
========================,,============================================
SUPPORT     ___________//___,  Philip Webb : purslow@××××××××××××××.ca
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|  Centre for Urban & Community Studies
TRANSIT    `-O----------O---'  University of Toronto

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