After writing my previous post about set operators I’ve added a few more things related to package sets to portage. First, operators can now also be used inside sets.conf files using the extend, remove and intersect options, each taking a whitespace separated list of set names (without the @ prefix), working analog to the operators in set expressions described in the previous post. The main difference is that the evaluation order is fixed now (unions come first, differences second and intersections last) while in expressions it’s left-to-right.
The second new feature is that package sets can now be (re)defined on the emerge command line. This is done using the following syntax:
emerge '@setname{key1=value1,key2=value2}'
where setname can either be an existing package set, or a new one to define a set without having to modify any files. Note the quotes that are necessary to ensure that emerge gets the argument as-is without interference from the shell. The nice thing is this syntax also works inside set expressions. The not-so-nice thing is that for now there are a few restrictions about the values you can use, as there is no quoting mechanism implemented yet (this is planned however). So using any of the following characters or whitespace inside the braces will lead to undefined behavior: { } @ = ,
Another restriction is that you may not redefine package sets that are created by a multiset section in sets.conf (as those use different options that only make sense when defining multiple sets at once).
Note that for redefining existing package sets you only have to pass those options that should be different from the sets.conf definition.
And last but not least, to make the above features a bit easier to use there is also a new DummyPackageSet class that can be used to build a package set only by using operators, and/or to include a few packages without having to edit an external file. So it’s even easier than before to define a new set @world-without-system, using
[world-without-system]
class=portage.sets.base.DummyPackageSet
extend=world
remove=system