On Thursday 12 February 2009 07:01:36 Dale wrote: > Sorry to butt in here. I !think! I get what sets does, you add a group > of packages to a file and then when you do the @sets thing, it > emerges/upgrades that group of packages. I get that part. I guess from > what I am reading that we the user OR the tree devs can create a sets > file.
Yes. The old split -meta ebuilds were a stop-gap hack while waiting for set functionality (the devs said as much in the kde split-ebuild handbook page) but required that a full-blown ebuild be written. Which then had to be manifested and either inserted in the tree or an overlay. i.e. waaaaaay too complex for what is really just a simple list. > So I could create a set called network and put things like Kppp, > ppp, wireshark and all the networky things in there for my use alone. Yes > I > assume that the tree devs can also create a sets file with say all the > KDE packages or maybe all the system packages in it for everybody to > use. Would that be correct? Yes. > I'm going to jump off a cliff here and ask this. How would I emerge > kde-meta-4.2 and all its friends without using layman or anything, just > a plain emerge @kde-meta and go to bed for a while? This would be using > the sets feature too. I am using portage-2.2_rc23 so I should be ready > to go with the new sets feature. Forget about anything with -meta in it's name if you want to use sets. As I said above, -meta ebuilds are a hack and an ugly one to boot (but useful nonetheless). Create a file called say "/etc/portage/sets/dale_stuff" and run emerge -av @dale_stuff Go to bed. To get all the kde stuff, I *think* that easiest would be to ask someone using kde-testing to mail you a copy of the set file included there. Or you could make one by hand with ls,grep,sed,awk and friends. > Oh, is there a really good howto somewhere? Real simple non-geek > speak. Cool examples would be really nice. I looked around gentoo.org > but nothing really spells it out. I did find a HUGE thread about it but > still not registering for me. I need a light bulb moment. O_O There isn't much in the way of docs. I read a blog post from one of the devs recently but have no idea where it is. I'll have a look. It would appear from some code snippets I saw there that you can even do nifty things like subtract one set from another. Say you wanted all of kde except three specific apps. Put those three in a set file, let's call it kde_exclude, and run some command along the lines of emerge @k...@kde_exclude portage will "subtract" the exclude file from the big one and merge just the difference. Cool, hey? -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
