An avid reader of ciaranm's blog, would know that with paludis you can use --dl-override-masks to see all the packages you need to unmask to install something.

Although --dl-override-masks is great improvement over portage's behaviour, if you want to try the latest version of kde you still have 15 entries to place into keywords.conf , and a few months ago you would have the same number of entries to put in package_unmask.conf. Being so exceedingly lazy that Mr Kipling's cakes are only middlin' good by comparison, I wrote a script to save me from this chore, gimme.rb.

Gimme uses the paludis ruby bindings to generate the dep list for what you'd like to install. Then it appends appropriate dependency specs to your keywords.conf, package_unmask.conf and licenses.conf files. Calling gimme.rb "=kde-base/kde-3.5.6" will put a small header into your keywords.conf and an entry for ~kde-base/kde-3.5.6::gentoo ~arch and the 14 other packages that you need to unmask to install kde.

Have a look at --help for all the options, the ones which are most useful are probably --pretend, which is fairly self explanatory, and --match-type, which will change the type of dep spec gimme uses to unmask your package.

If (when) you find a bug, just ping me on #paludis on Freenode with a link to your patch.

Within gentoo I'm one of the maintainers of the ruby herd, you can find most of us in #gentoo-ruby on Freenode if you have a question about ruby in gentoo. I'm also chief assistant to eroyf in his nascent brutalis project.

Outside of gentoo I've somehow ended up "writing" much of the ruby bindings for the Other Package Mangler, Paludis, mostly by ripping off what ciaranm started them with. I'll probably talk more about some of the scripts people have written, and how they can make your life better, when I have more time.

Again if you need help using paludis it's available in #paludis on Freenode, but I should warn you that it's not uncommon to be banned for asking a question that's in the FAQ.

Don't be a stranger.