This is probably the fifth time at least that I've been bitten by this...
Portage is great in that it manages compiles for a bulk of applications
(including dependencies) in one fell swoop.
Yesterday I emerged gnome - that was it, just gnome, and it took care of the
whole thing soup to nuts. Wahoo, and kudos to all of you who put in the
work.
But here's my issue... In emerging one of the 101 packages missing on my
system for gnome, a little blurb flew buy that should have caught my
attention, a message posted in the pkg_postinst() message indicating what I
should do now that my installation has completed.
That's well and good, but as it was one of only 101 other packages, that
message quickly gets lost in the shuffle.
So here's the enhancement: have portage collect all of these kinds of messages
and display them after all of the emerging has completed.
So here's my proposed enhancement: Before the call to pkg_postinst(), set a
flag that causes einfo/ewarn/etc. to tee the output generated by the ebuild
to /var/log/portage_postinst.log (or something configurable in make.conf,
whatever). Preface the first generated line with the ${P} so we know what
it's related to. After the pkg_postinst() method completes, clear the flag
and other emerges can carry on as they need to.
Had this kind of thing been in place, after emerging 101 packages I could go
to the postinst log and see everything that I had to do, including the little
blurb that I had missed before.
Yes, I know folks are going to say that you can enable portage logging and
look for messages that need to be taken care of. But I just emerged 101 new
packages, have many emerge -ud worlds, etc. resulting in almost 2000 files
out there in /var/log/portage. Talk about the needle in the haystack,
there's not even some specific keywords I could grep on to hit on the
relevant information.
Understandably I don't know what you all will say about this. It seems like a
great idea to me, and wouldn't appear to come with all the political issues
that the 'extending the ebuild meta data' or some other issues that have come
up recently.
But I'll leave it to the rest of you to decide...
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