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

[Tod M. Neidt]

On Mon, 2002-01-28 at 09:54, 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.
pkgsearch <foo>
will return <category>/<foo> for you.
It is found in /usr/lib/portage/bin
 
>     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.
knowing before hand would be a little tough, because what is installed
can be dependent on *your* personal USE settings.  After install you can
find this info in /var/db/pkg/<category>/<foo>/CONTENTS

>     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.

Like the other replies have said, emerge app-admin/gentoolkit
will give you several convenient scripts including qpkg, epm, and
etc-update.

>     I've noticed that much of the "guts" of portage is written in
>     Python, which is a language I deeply respect and which certainly
>     makes sense for this kind of application, but which is not my
>     personal preference as a scripting language.  However, it looks as
>     though all the Python code is confined to /usr/lib/portage; none of
>     the actual .ebuild scripts use Python.  Is this a deliberate choice,
>     and if so, does this leave the door open for people wishing to
>     access portage from other languages, such as Ruby or Scheme?

Unless, you want to hack the guts of portage, python coding isn't
necessary.  Ebuilds are bash with the addition of convenient bash helper
scripts found in /usr/lib/portage/bin and are designed to be not very
different from a typical ./configure, make, make install sequence for a
manual installation from source.
>
>     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).

There have been rumors of a successful port to ppc on #gentoo.
Package patching was required, IIRC

TheMadHatter where are you!?!??!

tod