On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 6:28 PM, Neil Bothwick<n...@digimed.co.uk> wrote: > On Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:06:42 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote: > >> I absolutely HATE this about portage. Update your machine just >> thinking about trying a new piece of software and then find you cannot >> immediately go back. Gentoo was supposed to be about choice. Seems >> it's not about my choice anymore. Bummer. > > You can tell before you perform the update that the old version is no > longer in portage,
How? I run eix-sync and at that point it's no longer in /usr/portage/distfiles. Am I supposed to study what eix-sync is going to do before it does it for the 800 or so packages that are on my system? Fat chance anyone does that on a regular and thorough basis. Or do you mean let eix-sync happen, then study emerge -pvDuN and somehow determine that it's going to delete one out of 100 packages that it's going to update? I'm lost. > then you can copy the ebuild from /var/db/pkg to your > overlay (and run quickpkg for speed) before updating. Remember that > nothing is ever truly removed from portage, it is still in the CVS attic, > > What would be handy would be a script that you run after you sync. If a > package you have installed is no longer in the tree, it copies the ebuild > to an overlay. Ebuild and the source code package also? (Sarcastically) What's an 'personal' overlay? You don't need one to install Gentoo. You don't seem to need one until it's too late and you have to somehow create it and deal with this after it's become a problem. My problem was I'm already toast at the dinner table tonight. I told the family that the machine doesn't work anymore and now it's not clear I'm allowed to sleep here anymore. Hard to build an overlay if I'm locked out. A different short-term solution might be to find another old junker machine that is supported, building it out of junker parts. This would be good if I had any certainty that when the work was completed portage wouldn't immediately create the same havok. Fool me once, shame on you portage. Fool me twice... - Mark
