Portage, example why the package manager is rubbish

_roman_ · 12-14-2017, 02:22 PM

A broken search feature of portage

Quote:

ASUS-G75VW roman # emerge -S x11-libs/xpyb

[ Results for search key : x11-libs/xpyb ]
Searching...

[ Applications found : 0 ]

ASUS-G75VW roman # emerge -s x11-libs/xpyb

[ Results for search key : x11-libs/xpyb ]
Searching...

[ Applications found : 0 ]

ASUS-G75VW roman # emerge -s xpyb

[ Results for search key : xpyb ]
Searching...

* x11-libs/xpyb
Latest version available: 1.3.1-r3
Latest version installed: 1.3.1-r3
Size of files: 268 KiB
Homepage: https://xcb.freedesktop.org/
Description: XCB-based Python bindings for the X Window System
License: MIT

[ Applications found : 1 ]

ASUS-G75VW roman #

I'm cleaning out the world set. who expect's that the search feature is broken

expected behaviour for example:

Quote:

ASUS-G75VW roman # qlist -Iv x11-libs/xpyb
x11-libs/xpyb-1.3.1-r3

quote man emerge:

Quote:

--search (-s)
Searches for matches of the supplied string in the portage tree. By default emerge uses a case-insensitive simple search, but you can
enable a regular expression search by prefixing the search string with %. For example, emerge --search "%^kde" searches for any package
whose name starts with "kde"; emerge --search "%gcc$" searches for any package that ends with "gcc"; emerge --search "office" searches for
any package that contains the word "office". If you want to include the category into the search string, prepend an @: emerge --search
"%@^dev-java.*jdk". If you want to search the package descriptions as well, use the --searchdesc action.

--searchdesc (-S)
Matches the search string against the description field as well as the package name. Take caution as the descriptions are also matched as
regular expressions.

Rant: I expect when i read search in the manpage that the search functionality does its job.

The man page for those two are just written very complicated and the software is just broken. From a lazy reader when I read the word "search" I expect the search functionality regardless If i just use a part or the full package name

--

usually you refer to a gentoo package by its full name, version number and overlay:

e.g.

Quote:

ASUS-G75VW roman # emerge -av =x11-libs/xpyb-1.3.1-r3::gentoo

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild R ] x11-libs/xpyb-1.3.1-r3::gentoo USE="(-selinux) -static-libs" PYTHON_TARGETS="python2_7" 0 KiB

Total: 1 package (1 reinstall), Size of downloads: 0 KiB

Would you like to merge these packages? [Yes/No]

_roman_ · 12-15-2017, 05:49 PM

Next issue is with slotted packages and how portage handles them!

You set your binutils to a certain slot number.

The developers bump the slot number and suddenly you are on a binutils version which is not in the tree anymore. Portage does not tells you that and you experience slight build issues. That would not be that worse when the developers would have hardmasked that binutil version, or just had updated the binutil to the last version available. For the kernel symlink they do this for you, they bump it to the latest kernel available. Which is of course bad for a binary nvidia driver user who needs a supported kernel branch.

Details, I have posted in this topic: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...cy-4175619470/

--

That portage has the same issue as 12 years ago with dependency resolution is also a known fact. The backtrack feature does not really help a lot.

Tree Cleaners do not do their job properly in dropping packages. I was quite happy as I saw for the wine project to move any outdated packages in an overlay. This should be done for the other packages also which are basically "not useable " anymore.

Half Efforts of the developers in some aspects. Best example is the slotted lua thing.

--

Gentoo should have cared about people a lot more. Those went off and made their own spinoffs. I doubt they provide anything back. I talk about caluclate linux, funtoo, pentoo to name a few. Sabayon is a different issue as it aims to provide binary blob distro, which were in the early days revertable to a running gentoo system.