Re: [gentoo-user] Package management, depclean and new installs

[Miles Malone]

I would strongly, STRONGLY discourage you from creating your own meta
package.  There are very few meta packages in the tree (in the scheme
of things) for very good reasons, they take one hell of a lot of
maintenance.  They're really only there for things like kde, where you
might just want a bare bones kde environment, or you might be
expecting the full-fat desktop environment with all the side packages
you'd get if you were using a distro that gave you no option out of
the box.

If you really want to group a bunch of packages into a set that gets
emerged with one command, I would do exactly that: create a custom
set.  Similar to @world, @system, @security, etc.  You can do that
quite easily, see https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Package_sets .

But really there's not a lot of use cases for it, mostly if you use a
package and it's not just a dep of something (or several things) you
should just have it in your world file, *for most people's use cases*.
Going through your world file and cleaning out cruft is a part of
regular gentoo maintenance, should be done at a minimum annually imo.
Much like cleaning out distfiles and whatnot (see eclean, from
app-portage/gentoolkit.  And, indeed, pretty much every other useful
utility in gentoolkit.  Also flaggie for use-flag management.)

On Mon, 4 Oct 2021 at 16:05, <coalml@××××.io> wrote:
>
> I thank the four of you for the insight I learn more in 5 mins then I did in an afternoon,I have two last question tho
>
> As a example, if you want a
> full KDE install, you just emerge the kde meta package and it gets
> recorded in the world file.  The emerge command will take care of all
> the other packages that depend on the meta package.  That is a LOT of
> packages too
>
> Theoretically I can make my own meta package and place in the localrepo I have and set it to pull packages from the official repos
>
> Firstly is there any dependency hell that I can fall into when placing lots of different packages with (unexpectedly) conflicting deps on my own meta package?Has anyone (reading this) that has done it before and worked out a niche way to avoid falling into that trap?
>
> Secondly(I know I will surely find this one in the wiki but)can I set a priority to pull from the local repo first if package exists and then have the official repo as a backup?
>
> Lastly thank you for your previous replies forgot to add it on my last mail and I didnt want to bloat the mailing list like im editing a forum post with asterisks :D
> .
> .
> .
> Thank you (ah I'm learning)
>
>
>