On 04/10/2021 07:13, Miles Malone wrote:
I would strongly, STRONGLY discourage you from creating your own meta
package. There are very few meta packages in the tree (in the scheme
of things) for very good reasons, they take one hell of a lot of
maintenance. They're really only there for things like kde, where you
might just want a bare bones kde environment, or you might be
expecting the full-fat desktop environment with all the side packages
you'd get if you were using a distro that gave you no option out of
the box.
If you really want to group a bunch of packages into a set that gets
emerged with one command, I would do exactly that: create a custom
set. Similar to @world, @system, @security, etc. You can do that
quite easily, see https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Package_sets .
But really there's not a lot of use cases for it, mostly if you use a
package and it's not just a dep of something (or several things) you
should just have it in your world file, *for most people's use cases*.
Going through your world file and cleaning out cruft is a part of
regular gentoo maintenance, should be done at a minimum annually imo.
Much like cleaning out distfiles and whatnot (see eclean, from
app-portage/gentoolkit. And, indeed, pretty much every other useful
utility in gentoolkit. Also flaggie for use-flag management.)
Yup. Emerge the packages you want, let portage take care of the rest.
And I've recently joined the group who let emerge default to --oneshot,
and use --select if I want to keep it ... :-)
And do learn how to use package.use. Don't clutter your make.conf with
loads of flags you don't understand (or want), just to get packages to
emerge. I use autounmask-write if I need to, then I DON'T let etc-update
update some huge package.use file. I just rename the new bunch of flags
into package.use/what-ive-just-emerged.date. That way, if I know I still
want that program, I let the file accumulate cruft :-), and if I'm
wondering what the hell it is or it looks outdated as heck, I just
carefully delete them one by one, and see what happens.
One last tip for a newbie - have you already got X, harfbuzz, and
freetype installed? If not, squirrel this info away until you need it -
harfbuzz often won't install because freetype isn't there. But freetype
won't install because harfbuzz isn't there! Find out what's pulling them
both in, do an emerge -C on that, then install either harfbuzz or
freetype with USE="-theother". Then an emerge --update should clean up
the mess :-)
Cheers,
Wol
