Revision as of 14:40, 19 June 2009

This article lists some neat things you can do with Portage/emerge.

/etc/portage directory

This directory contains important configuration files for Portage.

package.use lets you add local USE flags for certain packages. To add/remove certain languages, you can use expanded USE flags:

USE="linguas_en -linguas_fr"

Note that on these two files, each line must contain only the package name and the options. Don't add any comment (comments must use a whole line) after the package name and options.

It is located in /var/lib/portage/world.

--newuse will recompile packages that had their USE flags changed.
--depclean will attempt to remove packages that are no longer needed as dependencies.
--fetchonly will only fetch the distribution files.
-t will display a tree view. It can be very useful to know which package pulls in another one.
To emerge a particular version of a package: emerge =mypackage-0.6.3-r2

Collision protection cannot apparently be disabled, even with -collision-protect and -protect-owned. The only way to partly disable it is to use the environment variable COLLISION_IGNORE with a list of directories (those are not recursively ignored).

equery files ebuild_name will list all the files installed by the specified ebuild.

Profiles contain default configuration values and settings.
For a server machine, don't use the server profile. It is not yet production-ready. Use the generic profile, eg default/linux/x86/2008.0 (for a desktop box, use default/linux/x86/2008.0/desktop).

@@ Line 24: / Line 24: @@
 * -t will display a tree view. It can be very useful to know which package pulls in another one.
 * To emerge a particular version of a package: emerge =mypackage-0.6.3-r2
+== Features ==
+* Collision protection cannot apparently be disabled, even with -collision-protect and -protect-owned. The only way to partly disable it is to use the environment variable COLLISION_IGNORE with a list of directories (those are not recursively ignored).
 = Gentoolkit =