gentoolkit-lefou - useful administration script for Gentoo

Latest Version: 0.6.7

Some handy script for package management under Gentoo, e.g. upgrade of larger meta-packages like kde-meta or xorg-x11, cleanup of /etc/portage/package.* files, ...

gentoolkit-lefou supports the official package manager portage and its new inofficial successor paludis written in C++.

Philisophy

Any user is interested in a stable Linux system which is promptly usable in any situation and at the same time up-to-date including newest packages. But sometimes you are in the mood for trying a new package or you need the lates tool for something, which is in most cases marked as unstable or experimental - in Gentoo words it is masked by keyword or even hard masked.

How to combine both use cases? Simply allowing a concret version of a specific package to be unstable, but without risking to make the whole whole system unstable.

The tools

I wrote some helper scripts, to easy and enforce this philosophy.

eunstable, eunmask and efullunmask

These tools add a specific version of a specific package to there corresponding unmask files, e.g. /etc/portage/package.keywords.

- eunstable - add a package to package.keywords (or if you are using paludis to keywords.conf)
 - eunmask - add a package to package.unmask (or with paludis to package_unmask.conf)
 - efullunmask - does the same as both scripts obove but at once

Examples:

root@gentoobox# eunstable app-laptop/kthinkbat-0.2.4
>>> Adding "=app-laptop/kthinkbat-0.2.4 ~x86" to /etc/portage/package.keywords

root@gentoobox# eunmask kde-base/kdelibs-9999
>>> Adding "=kde-libs/kdelibs-9999" to /etc/paludis/package_unmask.conf

eupdate-unstable

Whenever you want to merge some new masked version of greater meta packages, you have to add any of the included dependencies to the corresponding places (package.keywords ...). With eupdate-unstable you can automate this process by simply running eupdate-unstable instead of you favorite package manager portage or paludis. eupdate-unstable will offer you options for any masked but needed package. Additionally, it brings the feature to automatically add all these new package, which are needed and which have no alternatives for unmasking.

Example: (This will add any packages needed for the new KDE with its version number, so no unstablization of your system, in general)

root@gentoobox# eupdate-unstable =kde-base/kde-meta-3.5.6

eupdate-unstable is using eunstable and eunmask internally.

emaskclean

According to the pilosophy explained above, your unmask files should only contain entries with specific version numbers of packages, no general package unmasking. With time goes on, there are a lot of unmask entries even for older version. emaskclean can analyse all your unmask files an prune those entries which belongs to packages not installed on your system anymore.

emaskclean will clean the following files, for portage:
- /etc/portage/package.keywords
- /etc/portage/package.unmask

emaskclean will clean the following files, for paludis:
- /etc/paludis/keywords.conf
- /etc/paludis/package_unmask.conf

Download and Installation

You can donwload the tar.bz2 archiv here: [/download/gentoolkit-lefou http://lepetitfou.dyndns.org/download/gentoolkit-lefou/]

Or you can use my [LefousPortageOverlay Portage Overlay] and simply emerge it.

root@gentoobox# emerge -av app-portage/gentoolkit-lefou

Or if you are using paludis

root@gentoobox# paludis -ip app-portage/gentoolkit-lefou
root@gentoobox# paludis -i app-portage/gentoolkit-lefou

Feedback and Bugs

Please use the ticket system to report bugs and feature requests.