On Sun, Jul 9, 2017 at 3:59 PM, Ста Деюс <sthu.d...@openmailbox.org> wrote: > > Is it possible to compile/install a testing version of a package w/ its > dependencies on a stable OS installation? -- I mean, if a have stable > installation of whole the system, can i compile and install a testing > version of single package and the packages this single package depends > on? >
Yes, for the most part. Obviously if whatever you want to install has a rats nest of unstable dependencies it can get messy. It isn't like you're going to be able to install one component of kde-6 on an otherwise kde-5 system, for example (when that comes along), and expect it to work. Typically you just stick whatever you're interested in /etc/portage/package.keywords. Then when you try to emerge it portage will indicate if any dependencies aren't fulfilled and offer to auto-unmask them for you. I find it to be a best practice to make /etc/portage/package.keywords a directory, and create files inside for various purposes. I have a file to put keywords in there for arch testing purposes. I have a file called zautounmask, which is where portage will dump auto-unmask settings (since it is last alphabetically). Over time when you have a million entries in these files having them separated will tend to make it a lot easier to clean them up. I can delete my auto-unmasked entries at any time and portage will just re-create the entries it actually needs the next time I do an update. Note that in general Gentoo doesn't do QA around mixed keywords. Typically it works fine, but you will run into exceptions. You'll be less likely to run into issues if you avoid running mixed keywords on things like core dependencies. You won't have trouble in general finding people to help, but ultimately nobody is going to officially bend over backwards to make it work. If you can identify what is causing a problem there is a decent chance it will get fixed (assuming upstream is cooperative - if some package doesn't work with a newer dependency upstream might just say they can't be bothered to fix it and it might not be easy to patch on our end). -- Rich
