Zack Medico - Latest comments on Using Blockers to Automatically Uninstall Unwanted Packages

In response to: Using Blockers to Automatically Uninstall Unwanted Packages

mimosinnet [Visitor] — Wed, 28 May 2008 00:11:53 +0000

Christian is right. I am one of those who are familiar enough not to fear "Unmerging it may be damaging to your system", but still not fully aware of the consequences. (See, for example, http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-688061.html).

Excellent feature! Most welcome!

In response to: Using Blockers to Automatically Uninstall Unwanted Packages

Zac MEDICO [Member] — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:27:22 +0000

In the particular case of coreutils and mktemp, it would be safe install the new coreutils first (overlapping with the mktemp package) and then remove any remnants of the mktemp package. In order to express cases like this, we can create a separate type of blocker having this property.

In response to: Using Blockers to Automatically Uninstall Unwanted Packages

Pacho Ramos [Visitor] — Wed, 07 May 2008 11:56:34 +0000

Thanks for add this feature :-D

About unmerging mktemp before coreutils, maybe portage could make a package before unmerging it with quickpkg for preventing a great breakage :-/

In response to: Using Blockers to Automatically Uninstall Unwanted Packages

Ciaran McCreesh [Visitor] — Wed, 07 May 2008 07:29:19 +0000

The problem is, that's not really the constraint... Solving this properly requires extending the blocker syntax to say "it's ok if you uninstall this after rather than before installing me". Until that's an option, automatic block resolution is extremely dangerous.

In response to: Using Blockers to Automatically Uninstall Unwanted Packages

Zac MEDICO [Member] — Wed, 07 May 2008 05:23:55 +0000

Admittedly, uninstallation of mktemp is a questionable operation. However it's the only solution given the constraint that two blocking packages cannot be installed simultaneously.

In response to: Using Blockers to Automatically Uninstall Unwanted Packages

Ciaran McCreesh [Visitor] — Wed, 07 May 2008 03:26:00 +0000

So you're unmerging mktemp *before* upgrading coreutils? Sounds like an extremely good way to break a system...

In response to: Using Blockers to Automatically Uninstall Unwanted Packages

Zac MEDICO [Member] — Wed, 07 May 2008 00:34:13 +0000

Actually, with portage-2.1.5 you don't need to do any /etc/portage/modules configuration to avoid the "Updating Portage cache" thing after sync. Now the default behavior is to use cache directly from the $PORTDIR/metadata/cache/ directory. As mentioned in the release notes, you have to add FEATURES=metadata-transfer to make.conf if you want the old behavior (which you probably don't).

In response to: Using Blockers to Automatically Uninstall Unwanted Packages

Daniel Drake [Visitor] — Tue, 06 May 2008 22:44:16 +0000

That's excellent. Thanks!

You should also blog about the /etc/portage/modules thing where it makes sync really quick.