Re: [gentoo-dev] general questions and thoughts on Gentoo

[Paul de Vrieze]

On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Mirian Crzig Lennox wrote:

>     When using portage, it's often the case that I know the name of the
>     package I want to install, but not what category it lives in.  Under
>     debian, for example, I could say "apt-get install zsh" to install
>     zsh, whereas in gentoo, I seem to have to remember that zsh lives in
>     app-shells.  This seems unnecessarily inconvenient, since it would
>     only be an issue if the same package name were used by more than one
>     package in more than one group.

Write a patch to emerge that does this, and submit it on bugs.gentoo.org
;-).

>     Another thing I kind of miss from other package systems is the
>     ability to know *before* I download a package what files it will
>     install.  The Mandrake, Debian, and FreeBSD ports collection provide
>     this information in various forms, which I've gotten used to, but
>     the /usr/portage hierarchy doesn't seem to store it anywhere.

You can check which packages are going to be installed with the --pretend
option to emerge. A file list is not available from the ebuilds for the
following reason: There is absolutely no way to know this because the
installed files depend on your systems actual configuration. It should be
possible to extract this information from a binary package though.

>     There are a few utilities which seem to be lacking, but which it
>     would appear to be trivial to add.  Something like RPM's "rpm -qf
>     <file>" facility to find out which package "owns" a particular file
>     would be useful.  This information is in the /var/db/pkg hierarchy,
>     so some kind of 'find&grep' method is all that's needed.

Look at the app-admin/gentool package, it provides qpkg which should do
exactly that (among others)

>     Finally, given that Gentoo is designed to be compiled from source at
>     install means that it should be fairly portable to other
>     architectures.  Has anyone tried installing Gentoo on a non-i386
>     architecture?  I wouldn't mind giving it a shot on my PPC-based
>     iBook (currently running YellowDog 2.1).

For the most part it should work, I think you should be carefull with
kernel patches, and the bootloader, but if the particular packages support
the architecture, it should work (Linux is linux). I would say, give it a
try (on a spare partition if possible).

By the way, as you would guess, the cd will not work, so you would need to
find out a way to do the bootstrapping without most of the initial system.
(It should also possible to regenerate the cd for ppc on your yellowdog)

Good luck,
Paul

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