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

[Arve Barsnes]

On Mon, 4 Oct 2021 at 08:05, <coalml@××××.io> wrote:
> 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?

Probably depends on what you intend this 'meta' package to do.
Something like the KDE meta package is rarely useful outside of DE's
in my estimate, and exist purely to create a KDE 'package' that users
can easily install without much consideration.

If you want to create your own groups of packages that you want to
install with a single command, I would look into sets. @system and
@world are sets that everyone uses, but it's easy to create your own
for whatever purpose.

Portage is usually pretty good at helping you figure out any
dependency conflicts, so I wouldn't worry about it. Might be worth
looking deeper into the way portage prints dependency errors if you
encounter problems though. As evidenced by many a thread on this list,
it can sometimes be very hard to understand, simply because there can
be a lot of it when there are conflicts, and it's easy to get
side-tracked by information that isn't directly related to your
problem.

> 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?

You configure your repos in /etc/portage/repos.conf. For each repo you
have the option of setting a priority. I think "official third-party"
repos installed through layman gets a priority = 50, and if I'm not
mistaken, the official repo have a default of 100. If you want your
own repo to be the first choice, give your repo a higher priority.

Cheers,
Arve