Disable automatic removal of packages not found in repos

[al-Quaknaa]

Hello everybody,
I'm really new to Sabayon, but I'm a long time gentoo user. I have two questions, actually. The first one is if I can use sabayon in a way that everything I find in sabayon repos I install with equo (which is an amazing package manager, BTW) and what I can't find, I either have an ebuild for or I create one and install with portage. For example I want to install some package from sunrise repo, so I:
- add sunrise with layman
- emerge package
- equo database gentoosync
- equo world --ask (this shows me which dependencies were in sabayon repo so I get them from there so that next time they're updated from sabayon repo, not with portage).

Is this OK? Am I going to break the system? If it's not OK, how am I supposed to install packages that are not in any of sabayon repositories?

The second question is - the package I installed was not in sabayon repo and equo is now asking me at the end of world update whether I want to scan and remove those packages that are no more available in online repositories. I'd like to disable this question (or auto-answer it "no") with some configuration option - is there any?

Thanks in advance, so far sabayon looks really, really cool.
al-Quaknaa

[wolfden]

I wonder if adding it to /etc/entropy/packages/package.unmask would work

mixing isn't recommended, but if you know what you are doing it's ok, make sure you use the -ask switch to see what changes are going to happen and if those changes can break anything cause you really don't want to be revdep-rebuild the system.

[al-Quaknaa]

Nope. Package.unmask didn't do it. Next question comes to mind - portage got support for package.keyword/unmask/mask directories some time ago, does this work with equo? If you don't know what I'm talking about:
instead of /etc/portage/package.keywords file you have
/etc/portage/package.keywords/main
/etc/portage/package.keywords/kde
and so on, which makes some batch changes (keywording/unmasking lots of packages at once) very easy.
Thanks,
al-Quaknaa
(if anyone has an idea how to solve the first problem it's welcome. It's still the more important thing for me)

[dagurasu]

In my short, one month Sabayon usage I have done alot of mixing in gentoo stuff that I need, packages that aren't in Sabayon, packages from overlays that aren't even officially in gentoo, and some packages that just aren't built with needed use flags in Sabayon. This is exactly why I am using Sabayon, to have a system pre-built by somebody else with binaries available on the spot when I want them, but still customizeable by me. I haven't had any serious problems, except for many package management issues like the one you point out and several other similar types of things. Especially though updating the world gets tricky since neither gentoo nor saboyon have full jurisdiction over the world anymore.

I think interoperability of entropy and portage is sometihng that could be developed alot more and it would be useful, not to complain, these ideas wouldn't even be on the table if not for entropy doing what it does pretty well.

[al-Quaknaa]

I totally agree. If I wanted just a binary distro I would have chosen something else. It is the option to use the power of ebuilds that makes Sabayon so appealing to me.

Could you please elaborate a bit more on what kind of troubles did you run into and (more importantly) how did you deal with them or how to prevent them? I was thinking that because entropy can sync the database with portage, I can just emerge whatever I need and then do
equo database gentoosync
equo world --ask (don't delete packages not in entropy)
equo database gentoosync
emerge -avutND world (which should do only the portage specific part of packages, right? Is this right, or does it mess the system up?)

How about keywording - did you have to keyword everything twice so that both equo world and emerge world behave nice?
Thanks for any piece of information, I can test, but this kind of experience is gained over time as the updates come and such, not overnight.
al-Quaknaa

[dagurasu]

So far I have not done much bulk upgrading but it's clear there are some issues, nothing I can't tackle, but just hitting "equo world" isn't going to cut it.

Some problems off the top of my head, some you've already alluded to

1)If you emerge something, it brings in dependancies that maybe could have come in through entropy instead. Maybe that's ok sometimes.. doesn't bother me actually. I don't expect portage to ever become officially sabayon aware, however, a script could be made (and included in sabayon) that call emerge --pretend and looks to see which dependancies can be satisfied from entropy.

1b) There may not be a good automated way at the moment to know if emerged dependancies can be replaced by entropy packages. Doing the "equo world --ask" tells you if there is a package in Sabayon with the same name but does entropy check the system database to see if it is breaking depends of non-sabayon installed packages? Maybe, I'm not sure. I doubt it. The version entropy wants to install may break the portage package that depended on it. Then you'd need to go back to gentoo again and check dependancies. I haven't tested any of this yet.

2)And this is a big one, For top level packages installed by portage sabayon seems happy to downgrade them to a sabayon version with an "update world", regardless of the fact that the installed version does satisfy the package and is newer. Placing the package in entropy's package.mask file only causes entropy, not surprisingly, to complain that the package can't be satisfied. One could just mask everything but the portage version and it might make entropy leave it alone.. until entropy one day reached the same version number which would effectively unmask it. You might say then you don't care, but you do if the reason you were using portage was for use flags. For quick bandaid though this solkution is probably ok. It's possible in my case the downgrade was becasue the packages being downgraded was installed with different use flags than what entropy thinks it should have(I should test). I doubt that the logic is this involved though, rather I think equo update world is more interested in getting you back to the sabayon tree than in worrying about satisfying your systems present dependancies. Becasue of this I worry even more about issue 1b.

Ideally there would be some way to tell entropy that another package manager is handling a certain package. (Of course that could mean entropy won't be able to create an updated consistent system if it's not able to upgrade that package, but that's kind of ok). This could be something like portages package.provided, not exactly though, maybe more like overlays. Dependancy management gets a bit messy and it's not obvious what the best solution are, but it's clear there is room for improvement. I have to wonder if it wouldn't have been simpler to build entropy as more of an extension of portage in the first place, for several reasons, but it's not.

I won't go into "entropy remove" problems right now. IMO this is command is a mess at the moment, but that's true with or without mixing portage into the works. There are probably some other things I've noticed that I can't remember right now. I'm not sure about double keywording but obviously it is a concern. Maybe there is a mechanism to copy the keywords automatically, gentoosync for instance. This issue kind of depends on finding ways to deal with these other problems and what those ways are.

As you can tell I am still learning about this too, but entropy is very new, so I expect such ambitious uses of it to have problems that haven't been thought of yet.