Michael Orlitzky posted on Thu, 17 Jan 2013 11:31:53 -0500 as excerpted: > In either case, to keep your world file accurate, you have to remember > to type an additional useless parameter every time you run the command. > When you're running depclean, you have to cross your fingers and hope > nobody forgot the magic --dont-break-world parameter. > > I've "solved" this by installing every single package as a dependency > of something in our company repo. So we emerge > dev-util/mike_wants_to_be_able_to_run_strace_on_apache (depending on > strace) instead of dev-util/strace. This makes it obvious what can be > removed; we don't have normal packages listed in the world file, so if > you see one, it was a mistake.
Different (and IMO nicer, but it requires portage sets support) solution here, same problem. Two part solution: 1) For years, I've had a set of aliases to emerge, most of which add -1, so I don't have to worry about world-file pollution. The aliases break down into two sets, ea* and ep*, emerge --ask and emerge --pretend. Examples: eaw emerge --ask @world (--update --deep --newuse are there too, and --jobs, etc, --with-bdeps=y is in my emerge defaults) epw same thing basically, but --pretend instead of --ask. eptw emerge --pretend --tree @world ea emerge -av1 $* epl emerge -pvlO $* (see the changelog for an upgrade before I do it) Significant to this discussion: ea2 emerge -av --select $* (the 2 being shorthand for NOT oneshot) (I have tab-completion stubs built on the normal emerge completions, too, so get full tab-completion on my short forms. =:^) I don't even /use/ the long forms any longer, except for copying to bugs, etc, only my short forms. So no weird stuff in @world, as I have -1 on my short forms by default, and specifically use the e*2 forms when I WANT it in world. As I said, I've been doing this for years now. 2) Portage sets support made things even better. They first appeared shortly before I setup my netbook, and in the process of going thru my existing world file to figure out what I wanted on the netbook, I simply split the world file into a bunch of categorized sets, beginning with the kde sets, which I manage in parallel to the ones found in the kde overlay (but with some package entries commented out), but extended to dev, net.admin, net.user, etc. Now my world-file is normally empty, with all packages that would normally be in world listed in a set instead, with the sets in turn listed in the world_sets file. So there's only two conditions under which a package would be listed in the world file instead of in a set to be found in world_sets: 2a) I sometimes use the world file as a "package purgatory", for packages I'm testing so I don't want them removed by depclean, but I've not yet decided to keep, so I don't want them in my normal sets, either. The world file is thus a very convenient middle ground. =:^) 2b) I somehow made a mistake, and something ended up in world that shouldn't have. (Due to my longstanding alias usage, this case has so far been entirely theoretical; I've not made that mistake since the introduction of sets... yet. But I'm glad the protection's there, in case I do. =:^) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
