Re: [gentoo-dev] Just another portage enhancement idea...

[Carlos Silva]

On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 09:18 -0400, Dave Nebinger wrote:
> This is probably the fifth time at least that I've been bitten by this...
>
> Portage is great in that it manages compiles for a bulk of applications
> (including dependencies) in one fell swoop.
>
> Yesterday I emerged gnome - that was it, just gnome, and it took care of the
> whole thing soup to nuts.  Wahoo, and kudos to all of you who put in the
> work.
>
> But here's my issue...  In emerging one of the 101 packages missing on my
> system for gnome, a little blurb flew buy that should have caught my
> attention, a message posted in the pkg_postinst() message indicating what I
> should do now that my installation has completed.
>
> That's well and good, but as it was one of only 101 other packages, that
> message quickly gets lost in the shuffle.
>
> So here's the enhancement: have portage collect all of these kinds of messages
> and display them after all of the emerging has completed.
>
> So here's my proposed enhancement: Before the call to pkg_postinst(), set a
> flag that causes einfo/ewarn/etc. to tee the output generated by the ebuild
> to /var/log/portage_postinst.log (or something configurable in make.conf,
> whatever).  Preface the first generated line with the ${P} so we know what
> it's related to.  After the pkg_postinst() method completes, clear the flag
> and other emerges can carry on as they need to.
>
> Had this kind of thing been in place, after emerging 101 packages I could go
> to the postinst log and see everything that I had to do, including the little
> blurb that I had missed before.
>
> Yes, I know folks are going to say that you can enable portage logging and
> look for messages that need to be taken care of.  But I just emerged 101 new
> packages, have many emerge -ud worlds, etc. resulting in almost 2000 files
> out there in /var/log/portage.  Talk about the needle in the haystack,
> there's not even some specific keywords I could grep on to hit on the
> relevant information.
>
> Understandably I don't know what you all will say about this.  It seems like a
> great idea to me, and wouldn't appear to come with all the political issues
> that the 'extending the ebuild meta data' or some other issues that have come
> up recently.
>
> But I'll leave it to the rest of you to decide...

I could be wrong, and if i am, someone from the portage team to correct
me, but i think this will come in the next major version of the portage
along with the tool elog.

-- 
Carlos "r3pek" Silva
Gentoo Developer (kernel/amd64/mobile-phone)