[gentoo-user] Re: update problems

[James]

Neil Bothwick <neil <at> digimed.co.uk> writes:


> I take a different approach, I have a set called temp in my world_sets. If
> I want to try something out, I "echo cat/pkg >>/etc/portage/sets/temp"
> then I can try it and keep it updated during the trial and not have to
> worry about its deps. All I need to do is look at the temp file from time
> to time and remove anything I no longer want, then it gets depcleaned
> along with its dependencies.

That's a good approach. But, what I'm looking for could be a general
purpose tool for *all* of the gentoo community to parse and identify
packages that are not being updated or at lease fall into the orphan
category. One common case is those packages installed (-1). I'd venture to
guess from time to time that most gentoo users have packages installed that
are not dependencies for any other packages. Often is it by accident or
extreme manual cleansing events (like the recent ncurses episode) that folks
stumble across these orphaned packages.   I just think a tool or option in
an existing tool does/should cover that scenario. It is a routine need, imho.

That said are there any make.conf mods need to use sets like this,
or just create the dir and and use your command line string?

I might not use it permanently the way you do, but I can see putting
a collection of (-1) packages into a set, for organizational structure.
With clustering now infecting my gentoo world, I'll need a master by
architecture, logically organized collection of "sets" to cover the myriad
of node set-ups. Each system will most likely have a different installation
of these sets. And the cluster is now moving to a multi-arch setup
with aarch64.


So you idea is worth pursuit for me at this time. I still need that tool
to at least identify the (-1) installed packages. I know we have 'equery
depends' but that does not traverse the entire list of installed packages,
or did I miss that syntax?  Any ideas on that sort of (-1) parsing are
keenly appreciated ?


James