Re: [gentoo-user] emerge all but...

[Mark Knecht]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 9:40 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote:
<SNIP>

> I mentioned this on -dev once when this topic came up.  Thing is, portage is
> not the only package manager being used.

That's an important point.

> Personally I think portage should
> be the official package manager and if you chose to use something else, you
> should know what not to do to the system.

Unofficially I think it is! ;-)

> Portage requires python but I
> think one of the other package managers uses C or something.  Remove C on my
> rig, no big deal as far as being able to boot and re-emerge a package.

Careful. Can you really emerge gcc without at least one version of gcc
on the system? I didn't think so unless you've got access to a binary
somewhere, such as the install tarball or something like that. Even
that could be a problem. I did some cleanup a few years ago that
removed an old version of gcc and found I couldn't build anything
anymore. Embarrassing!

> Do
> it on a system with some other package manager and you are in a mess.  Point
> being, it's sort of hard for them to list them since it depends on what
> package manager you are using.
>

True, and a more experienced user can use equery, among other tools,
to determine what dependencies a package has. Problem was my previous
answer didn't mention that.

> There are some packages I installed and still don't know much about.  lol
> Sort of funny in a way.  Most of them "just work" so we don't need to know
> much about them.

Actually, for me it's _most_ packages I know NOTHING about. This
machine has XFCE, Gnome and KDE. It has only 38 packages in the world
file and yet emerge -e @world would build 970 packages. That's a LOT
of unknown stuff for a user type like me to know anything about! (Or
honestly, I probably know _NOTHING_ at all about at least 900 of those
packages...)

Cheers,
Mark