Re: [gentoo-user] emerge --update behavior

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 01/02/12 12:29, Mark Knecht wrote:
>
> That works for the case where the software is managed by portage,
> which is likely 99.9999% of what's on Gentoo systems worldwide. It
> doesn't work however for the odd case where I write some little
> program which requires a library (ta-lib in my portage file) and I
> don't write an ebuild to build it. I've never bothered to learn to do
> my own ebuilds but at some level it would be a good idea, and I think
> it would address Mr. Orlitsky's issue about what his users need and
> why. If they are on Gentoo then they could write a simple ebuild that
> did nothing but install the packages they want. That ebuild goes into
> world and let's him understand why every package in on the system. In
> the earlier example if all 4 files were required then this user ebuild
> has 4 entries in it. They ask him to run it, he runs it, it's in
> world. End of package issue I think.
>
> It doesn't address more system'ish things like editing config file to
> support those things, etc, but I don't know how that gets done unless
> he grants sudo to them, etc.

I have started writing ebuilds for my own sanity, but it doesn't
actually fix the problem. Unless you have perfect discipline and always
use --oneshot along with --update, you still don't actually know
anything about the packages in your world file!

Another example: I have a custom ebuild to install the dependencies for
www-apps/movable-type-5.02. One of its dependencies is dev-perl/DBD-mysql.

If I have both www-apps/movable-type-5.02 and dev-perl/DBD-mysql in my
world file, can I remove the latter? Who knows. Maybe I added it on
purpose because I need it, and maybe I forgot --oneshot while updating it.

There's no way to tell, and the existence of the ebuild doesn't preclude
--oneshot mistakes.