Re: [gentoo-user] no-emul profiles

[Marc Joliet]

Am Wed, 19 Nov 2014 23:09:16 +0200
schrieb Gevisz <gevisz@×××××.com>:

> Looking into profile list, I have found out new,
> at least for me, no-emul profiles. (As far as I
> remember, they were not there one and a half
> years ago, when I installed my first Gentoo system.)
>
> I tried to google something about them but have
> found virtually nothing except for the following
> wiki page: http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Multilib_System_without_emul-linux_Packages
>
> It is not about profiles at all but I guess that
> no-emul profile provides the same result while
> installing the system.
>
> Am I right?

In short: yes, I think so.

It Looks to me like a new profile that uses proper multilib (something that
some Gentoo devs have been working on for several years now, in fact) instead
of the pre-compiled 32 bit packages (app-emulation/emul-linux-*), so that now,
finally, (some) packages can be compiled for both 32 and 64 bits. Specifically,
I think it is explicitly for wine users.

Actually, I'm mildly excited that proper multilib (at least for amd64) appears
to be nearing completion, or at least a usable state.

> If so, I have a few more questions:
>
> Is it stable?
>
> Is it worth to choose it while installing a new Gentoo system?

No clue about these two, since I haven't tried it, but I've never heard of
"experimental" profiles, so I don't expect it to be broken (but see below).

Anyway, I just switched to default/linux/amd64/13.0/no-emul-linux-x86/desktop
as an experiment and am waiting for emerge @world to finish :) .

So the no-emul-linux-x86 profiles are fairly simple: they unmask the abi_x86_32
USE flag (at least for enough packages to satisfy wine's dependency tree), mask
the emul-linux-* packages, and mask some older versions of packages that don't
have the necessary multilib support.  I needed to upgrade 5 packages, of which
four (gnutls, texinfo, nettle, and libSM) have open stabilisation bugs.  The
one without was wine, but I don't mind in its case.  After that and adding lots
of abi_x86_32 USE flags, portage was able to sort out all blockers by itself
and emerge @world started running successfully.

There is also a corresponding abi_x86_64 USE flag that remains masked, so you
don't get the full granularity yet, but it will get there eventually :) .

> Can I expect that in this case I will be able to install
> and run such applications as, say, wine?

I would expect so.  The wine ebuilds (at least for version 1.7.x) have supported
multilib for a while now (just check the changelog), as an alternative to the
emul-linux-* packages.

> Thank you.

HTH
-- 
Marc Joliet
--
"People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we
don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup