Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Compiler Flag -m64 Gives Warning

[Frank Peters]

On Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:14:21 +0000 (UTC)
Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net> wrote:

>
> Second, I'll mention what has become my favorite under-appreciated
> portage feature, FEATURES=buildpkg.  This creates binpkgs (in /usr/
> portage/package by default, see the make.conf and portage manpages for
> details on changing this and other settings) of everything you emerge.
> Total additional space required, 3-4 gigs (you can do it in 2 gigs but
> it's tight).  But after you've accumulated binpkgs of everything on your
> system, if you upgrade something and it doesn't work, no sweat, just
> emerge --pkgonly the old working version.
>

This is something that I will definitely implement.  Most updates should
be unproblematic, but it's always good to have some insurance.

What I would really like to have, though, is a way to get portage to
recognize packages that I have installed myself.  There are certain cases
where I prefer to manually compile a library or utility.  When I do so,
portage will fail to recognize this and may try to automatically recompile
the installed package if it is a dependency for some other package.
Invoking emerge with --nodeps can avoid this problem, unless there are
yet other dependencies that I would like portage to automatically resolve.

Some may argue that it is best to let portage handle everything and not
interfere, but I have considerable experience in maintaining a Linux
system and I know what can be safely done.  The few packages that I
prefer to compile myself will not muck things up for me.

From what I've read in the Gentoo manuals, there does not seem to be
a way to signal to portage that a certain package has been separately
installed.  In my opinion, something like this could be useful for
some users.

Frank Peters