Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo healthy?

[Benno Schulenberg]

Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Wednesday 20 December 2006 21:09, Benno Schulenberg wrote:
> > Mark Knecht wrote:
> > > At that point it's gone. I cannot put into an overlay
> > > what I don't have. Probably most frustrating has been that I
> > > don't know it will be removed until it's been removed.
> >
> > You could, as soon as you have a system in a working state, tar
> > up the entire /usr/portage tree, [...]
>
> No, no, no that's waaaaaaaay too much work.

On the contrary, it's very little work: just a simple tar command.  
But the tarball will eat loads of disk space when not excluding 
distfiles.

> Archive a portage tree by all means. But if an ebuild is removed
> that a user want to keep, the solution is so simple it's amazing.
> Copy the ebuild to /usr/local/portage [...]

But he can't: the ebuild is gone.  That is the case we're trying to 
solve here: he has emerged a newer version of a package, finds it 
doesn't work correctly, wants to go back to the previous version, 
but seess that that version is gone.  How to get it back?  One way 
is to get it from viewcvs on the net.  Another way is to keep a copy 
of all the ebuilds yourself.  It's a big waste of space, but it is 
simple, no searching on the web required.

The best way, of course, is to use the binary package thing.  Mark: 
add EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="-b" to your /etc/make.conf.  This will 
tell emerge to also build a binary package for every package that 
you emerge.  Whenever you find that an upgrade of some package was 
unfortunate, do an  'emerge  -K  =package-x.y.z'  with the exact 
version number you want to restore, and done.  No manual tarring 
and untarring required, emerge does it all.

Benno
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