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

Scott F. Kiesling kiesling+ at pitt.edu
Wed May 28 10:44:47 EDT 2003


Hi Don-

I think all of these are answered somewhere in the forums
http://forums.gentoo.org. If not, I usually get a pretty quick answer to
posts there.

> 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?
Yes. qpkg. It's a utility in the package gentoolkit.

> 	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)
Looks right to me.

> 	How do I remove a package? (a la "rpm -e")
# emerge unmerge <package name>

> 	Is there a "best way" to run emerge? (see my bloat comment below)
I think there's a command to clean things up when done -- man emerge.

> 
> 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?
That's one for the forums -- I think there's a way of finding out what
depends on it, but you could always unmerge and then re-emerge later if
you need to.

> 
> 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?)
It should be fine to delete them. I think --clean is default, but man
emerge.

> 	What other steps are in order to keep Gentoo lean-n-mean?
You might also want to get rid of files in /usr/portage/distfiles (I
have 359Mb there now), unless you think you will need to re-emerge the
packages you have there.

SFK
-- 
Scott F. Kiesling <kiesling at pitt.edu>




More information about the wplug mailing list