Preventing entropy from downgrading portage packages

[kakak]

Greetings.

Apologies if this is a FAQ or something. I've looked around, honest. I'm looking for a way of preventing entropy from wanting to downgrade packages that I've installed via portage. For example, I'm using kdenlive ( a video editing app ), and according to kdenlive devs, libsdl-1.2.13 is quite buggy and not good at all for kdenlive users. So I've installed 1.2.14 via portage. Also I've built various X libs, mesa, ati drivers, etc, for my r600 card ( it's working great with KMS and DRI2 by the way ).

I know about and have set:

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ignore-spm-downgrades|enable

in /etc/entropy/client.conf ... but this only prevents downgrading packages with a -9999 version number. It doesn't help with my libsdl example.

To make things more complicated ... I understand that some library upgrades ( eg libsdl ) require rebuilding things that are linked against them. So I can see that the simple option of just ignoring entropy's dependency requirements could lead to broken packages, with some software installed that is expecting libsdl-1.2.13, but instead finding libsdl-1.2.14. Curse the people who break binary compatibility with minor version bumps!

So what might help out is a way to tell entropy to ignore some packages completely ... a bit like /etc/portage/packages.mask. This way I could use portage to rebuild anything that depends on libsdl that I've just upgraded, and entropy wouldn't try to undo my work.

Is this possible?

[Fitzcarraldo]

Dont' forget to do the following every time you install/upgrade/downgrade/uninstall a package via Portage:

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# equo database gentoosync

Have a look at the following articles in Wiki which may be of some help:

HOWTO: Safely mix Entropy and Portage

HOWTO: Fix what portage breaks (minimize portage use by moving packges back to entropy).

Masking and Unmasking Packages in Entropy


EDIT (October 25, 2010 09:35 BST): The syntax of the above-mentioned Equo command was later changed by the developer to: equo rescue spmsync

[DontPanic]

Also, just for clarification, the -9999 revision number that you are referring to is an entropy-specific revision number that is tracked in addition to the normal version number. And entropy applies the -9999 revision number to any package that was built with portage (after it discovers them via the "equo database gentoosync" run).

For example, if you "emerge -1av =libsdl-1.2.14", followed by the "equo database gentoosync" suggested by Fitzcarraldo, entropy will enter that package in it's database as version 1.2.14, but will also add a separate -9999 revision tag to keep track of build revisions within a given version.

Then, entropy will proceed to ignore packages with the -9999 revision number (essentially, it's code for portage-built) when ignore-spm-downgrades is enabled.