[wplug] General Gentoo questions (and a bit of emerge wackiness)

Vanco, Donald VANCOD at PIOS.com
Wed May 28 09:18:52 EDT 2003


Hi all -
	I have a few general questions about Gentoo that I'm hoping some of
you can answer.  I had hoped that this kind of stuff would be in the docs,
but so far the info there has been kinda lacking.
	Please excuse any "Red Hat equivalencies" I might allude to - but
it's what I'm most familiar with these days....

1) Package maintenance
	How can I tell exactly what packages are installed on my box at any
given moment? (like an "rpm -qa")
		- RH boxen keep a log file of this generated by a cron job -
does Gentoo do similar?
	How can I tell if I have broken dependencies or altered packages?
(like an "rpm -Va")
	I want to insure that my system is fully updated - am I correct in
thinking the process is:
	emerge sync
	emerge -u system
	emerge -u world
	???? or is there a more logical way (yes - I would use the "-p"
option initially to see wassup)
	How do I remove a package? (a la "rpm -e")
	Is there a "best way" to run emerge? (see my bloat comment below)

2) Change
	At some point in my frenzied emergeing my system installed ssmtp as
a dependency (I'm guessing).  I now want to upgrade to qmail, so there's a
"Block" from ssmtp against qmail.  What's the appropriate course for
resolving these blocks?  Do I force a removal of ssmtp?

2) System maintenance
	Can someone explain the logging structure?  I'm used to a
"var/log/messages" file - and /var/log seems to have a slew of subdirs of
dubious function...
	My system (after weeks of building the UberLaptop) is becoming
bloated. Is it safe to nuke the contents of /var/tmp/portage if all packages
in question have installed without issue?  Is there a reason that it's still
here? (should I use the "--clean" option with emerge?)
	What other steps are in order to keep Gentoo lean-n-mean?




Interesting experience......
	When trying to install gphoto2 on my laptop I had initial issues.
	Trying to emerge the package got me a 3 beep warning and then a
message that said:
-----------Access Violation Summary---------------
LOG FILE = "/tmp/sandbox/blah/blah/blah"

open_wr: /var/lib/rpm/_db.Name.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
	...and the compile exited after doing a slew of "make"s when
"creating test-filesys"

	So - I tried to do it manually.  I ran the configure with
"--enable-docs --with-drivers=all and --disable-SERIAL (and -serial)"
	The config seemed to run fine.
	make seemed to run fine.
	make install resulted in a stop that initially looked like it was
related to serial support.  My system has no serial port, hence my attempts
to disable serial - which were seemingly ignored.
	At this point I started to compose a "Help!" email - but since I
wanted to get preview support for gphoto I went ahead and emerged aalib.
	Re-running the make install at this point completed without error.
	Weird.

Don



More information about the wplug mailing list