how to deal with portage

[supermihi]

Hi,

I am a long-time gentoo user (no developer) and now trying to switch to sabayon, because of its nice preconfiguration and the fancy cutting-edge software it contains. The first thing I did was to sync portage & the sabayon overlay, and then looked what to update (-uDN). I wasn't happy about what I found then:
- almost (?) every installed package is in the world-file. Isn't it the meaning of /var/lib/portage/world to contain only the main applications you really want to have installed, not all the dependency-crap that comes in automatically?
- package.mask, package.use and package.unmask are full of (undocumented) crap

I am really impressed about what sabayon is that gentoo isn't, but the state of portage in sabayon is simply a mess, IMHO. You say sabayon is for newbs as much as for geeks, but I (and I would call myself a geek) am not very keen about reducing the world file from 1200 to maybe 100 entries I normally have on plain gentoo. Or isn't sabayon meant to run emerge -uD world at all? Is upgrading from the next release-DVD the only reasonable way to keep sabayon up-to-date? That's not what I'd call geek-compatible.

Please don't get me right, I don't wanna start a flame on this, but I just can't understand the developers motivation to deal with portage this way, and find it very hard to customize sabayon to my needs after installation. I'd be very glad if s/o could clarify this for me, and/or give me hints how to customize sabayon (especially: sabayons portage) to be more gentoo-like (I don't consider dep -w as a solution!)

[Appleman1234]

I know Sabayon's world configuration is crap, Sabayon ships with broken portage and package.* configuration which needs to be fixed. Immediate /etc/make.conf customisation and package.use , package.mask, package.umask and package.keywords changes and customisation should be done by experienced Gentoo users on any Gentoo system. Then emerge udept and remove redudancies from world using dep -w, then remove unwanted packages from world.

Problem solved with a little effort....

Also see The Sabayon Package management guide on the wiki.

[supermihi]

Of course, as an experienced user it's not a real problem for me to fix all these things, but that's absolutely not "the gentoo way" - installing a distribution with 9 GBytes of Software and then cutting it down to what you need. At least, it should be easier to cut it down, which could be accomplished by a clean world file - sabayon might have ~250 "real" applications installed, it would be quite easy to just remove those in world and then rum emerge --depclean.

So my question is still - why don't the devs clean up the portage system?

[schivmeister]

Exactly my thoughts..i would love the world list to be trimmed down to the main things we would need and the package.* to be less hectic. But i guess Appleman summed it up, we would need to do that ourselves. Catering to both geeks and newbs means just that - doing it your way. So maybe for us who really want to go black-hole, it's a little trade-off and effort.

And yes u are right, SL strongly recommends against the use of world and using the optical discs to upgrade instead. And i would guess that warning would be for those not willing to delve into the geek customization subconsciously, meaning many SL users and future targets. I know atleast wolfden, maybe appleman above and the rest involved with the project keeps their system up-to-date with world (sorry if i got that wrong hahah), so it can be done.

9GiG of applications is also the reason why I use miniEd Less apps, better.

[Appleman1234]

I use world on occasion, but prefer to use kuroo (Yess you all hate it, but it allows me to look through all packages and updates and update them based on a software policy (not a built in feature yet, but I hope to make it one.)) given that Sabayon is ~amd64 and I would need a very dynamic package.keywords to meet my software requirements. The reason Sabayon doesn't ship with a "The Gentoo Way" world file is because it isn't Gentoo.

I do agree that in future releases, the world file and other portage configuration should be trimmed and fixed.

[w98]

Code: Select all

# for i in `equery list | grep kde`
do
emerge -Cq "$i"
done

That cleared up a lot of clutter for me right there I'm a gnome fan, but love the idea of having a helluva quicker way to get gentoo installed with gnome/xorg. Last time I did gentoo 2006.1 on my laptop, it took three days of manual installation/emerge nonsense to get xorg and gnome up and running, and then ran into video issues, so decided to try harder to get SL installed.

But yes I agree -- the "out of the box" installation seems to try to be "all things to all people". That was my first impression. I told the installer that I wanted to use Enlightenment and after about 3 seconds of using it and hating it, resigned myself to another day or two of emerge'ing gnome, only to find out that gnome, kde, and a half dozen other window managers were all already installed. Kinda nice I could just switch my session, but it also means a lot of stuff got installed that I don't need on here.

And don't get me started on make.conf I just about fell out of my chair when I looked at the list of USE flags. So I whittled those down to only what I intend to use on the laptop, and when it comes time to 'upgrade' my workstation/server here at home, I'll be sure to whittle it again. In the meantime, I've done my favorite "get gentoo fixed up after installing" command:

Code: Select all

 emerge --sync && emerge -uN gcc && emerge -uDNq system && etc-update

(i did this after removing the KDE packages of course -- no sense wasting time/bandwidth on upgrading stuff I'll never use)

... and the system seems a lot more responsive already. Also, since my laptop graphic chipset is 'teh suck', I uninstalled all of the games, but still have 8GB of software on here that I plan to clean up. Have a 40GB drive in the laptop, but using 25% of my drive on an installation seems way too high. It would have been nice to have the installer let me pick and choose that "yes, I want gnome and its applications", "no, I don't want KDE or any of its applications", "no, I don't want games installed", that sort of thing.

Par for the course, really, from any other distro. I've used Slackware since v1.0 as well, and built my web hosting business around RedHat since 4.2, and it always installed extra junk. I always spent a few days streamlining their distro (and subsequently, Fedora) on servers I was running, until I closed up my hosting business. And more recently, Ubuntu, for quick installation and to tinker with a Debian-based distro.

Since hindsight is always 20-20, I guess I should have downloaded the mini 3.3 distro

So once I'm all cleaned up, my laptop will be back to it's screaming, blazing self, handling all of my OSS projects, etc. And I'll probably grab the mini 3.3 distro for my workstation and spend some time getting distcc running with the laptop and maybe my wife's windoze machine (she'll never notice) to speed things up some, lol.

But on a positive note, sweet, sweet kudos and mad props and whatever other modern slang is being slung around these days to pat you guys on the back for a great graphical installer. Beats the heck out of the GUI installer that shipped with gentoo 2006.1 (hint: yours WORKS). The logo is neat, although I haven't made the connection between a chicken footprint and an Italian dessert?

[schivmeister]

For package selection, as pointed out by this review:

It's ridiculous to me to have -that- much software installed, but as I mentioned, that's why there is a Mini-Edition. I gave it a bit of thought, and wondered why there was not a package selection during the install, like there is with SuSE or other distros. I thought about how Portage works though, and if I were a developer, I would not want to go through the headache. It -is- possible, but it would have to be done by compiling most everything during install, similar to what the Gentoo Live CD does. To save time, Sabayon includes binary packages of everything, which is why it installs so fast. But as it stands, there are far too many issues that could arise from having a package selection, such as broken dependencies. This is hard to pull off without the need of compiling, since Portage compiles everything that's open source.

I could be looking at this the wrong way, but I believe it a package selection were possible with Portage, it would have been done already. If you don't mind a PC with loads of software, then this will not affect you at all. If you like having a slim PC with only the packages you use, like myself, then you should be prepared to go through Kuroo or the command line to uninstall what you don't need. In this instance, I prefer Kuroo simply because it makes uninstalling mass amounts of software all at once relatively easy.

[lxnay]

The PROBLEM is that we take a snapshot of the Portage tree, enter in the "Portage Freeze release mode" and then fix the broken things. So, if after that date, the so called kind gentoo devs mask/unmask/remove something, we can't do nothing at the moment. If you've ever run Gentoo unstable, these things are usual. It's NOT a Sabayon issue, it's how gentoo manages the unstable: they don't care much about packages stability over time.

[lxnay]

Also, another issue on Gentoo is that PORTAGE dependencies management just SUCKS A LOT.

[nikaya]

Also, another issue on Gentoo is that PORTAGE dependencies management just SUCKS A LOT.

Hi,
did you thought about alternatives,i.e Paludis?I'm using only Paludis since quite a time beeing impressed and satisfied.
Sure,he is stricter than Portage,but is that not the business of a package manager?