Portage on Mac OS X

Do you really need a gui for portage? It’s not difficult to use at all.

No, you’re right, I don’t need a GUI. Some of the other stuff in the todo list is interesting. My main beef with portage is that it seems to not upgrade some packages even if you give it all the recursive all flags you can. That and slowly breaking subtle integration in the desktop world each time you do a full upgrade. I’m learning that that’s more universal than just portage. MEPIS (read: debian) lost it’s mind after a few upgrades. SuSE (ftp) bugs started cropping up. Fedora Core 2 seems to be fairly stable, but most of the updated packages have been fairly minor so far.

When I say “lost its mind” and such, I’m not saying the machine ground to a halt. It more that little things, like the Flash reader, camera, etc would stop working after an upgrade, causing me to have to dive into config files to attempt to get them working again.

Unfortunately, with a pre-setup system for me it’s all of nothing. If it doesn’t work right every time, it’s more trouble to figure out what has broken rather than just doing it yourself in the first place. The problem is there isn’t a document describing what in fedora has been changed, so you can’t recreate the original config.

Interesting, it sounds as if Gentoo MacOS will pack its own version of gcc as an option. Assuming that you keep a current version of gcc, are there going to be binary compatibility issues with older versions os OS X? If I compile app foo on Jaguar w/gcc 3.4 or 3.5, will it run?

I’ve tried pkgsrc before, on Solaris/SPARC. It’s a very easy, simple, portable ports systems from guys at NetBSD team. If you really want to have BSD package system from a BSD team, then you really need this.

Check the website of pkgsrc at

http://pkgsrc.org

Of course, they have MacOS X binaries on download page too. And the docs are awesome.

BSDero

“My main beef with portage is that it seems to not upgrade some packages even if you give it all the recursive all flags you can. That and slowly breaking subtle integration in the desktop world each time you do a full upgrade. I’m learning that that’s more universal than just portage.”

I’ve had my current Gentoo installation since October 2002, and it’s still runs perfectly. Unless something of an unforseen catastrophic nature occurs, I plan to continue using this installation as long as possible.

I also keep most packages @ x86 (except for those in package.keywords), I never use emerge -u world, and I make sure I keep tabs on the files on my system with some handy scripts found in the forums (such as dep and cruft).

Not long ago, maybe 6 months or a year… yes you were right, even when you ran an emerge -pUD world, it would miss upgrading some packages.

That is no longer true, however. I double check often (by making a fake /var/cache/edb/world file with qpkg), and emerge with the U and D flags has not missed a single upgradeable package in ages.

I also keep most packages @ x86 (except for those in package.keywords), I never use emerge -u world,

If you use package.keywords it is better to use the “-u” flag as opposed to the “U” flag.

Thanks for the tip. The big problem I remember was my camera in KDE: one day it worked, after an upgrade, it didn’t. Figured out there was something funky with libgphoto that if I installed it from portage, it didn’t find my camera. Installed from source (save version it worked fine). I remember my mouse failing after an upgrade (USB logitech), and of course the nvidia binary driver having to be uninstalled and reinstalled[0] after emerge world, which means I can’t get back into X, since my monitor (SGI 1600sw, via DVI) doesn’t play nice with the open nv driver.

[0] I was *very* unhappy about that. We’re not dealing with Windows 95, after all.

I meant I don’t use either. I do all my updating by hand (i.e. individual packages). This way I can keep track if any package gives me problems and back out easily.

Very prudent. I use the “-u” switch but only with “-p”. From there I usually emerge packages seperately.