Old Gentoo system? Not a problem...
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Wed 21 January 2015If you have a very old Gentoo system that you want to upgrade, you might have some issues with too old software and Portage which can't just upgrade to a recent state. Although many methods exist to work around it, one that I have found to be very useful is …
Stepping through the build process with ebuild
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sun 20 April 2014Today I had to verify a patch that I pushed upstream but which was slightly modified. As I don't use the tool myself (it was a user-reported issue) I decided to quickly drum up a live ebuild for the application and install it (as the patch was in the upstream …
Upgrading old Gentoo installations
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sun 29 December 2013Today I got "pinged" on bug #463240 about the difficulty of upgrading a Gentoo Linux deployment after a long time of inactivity on the system. We already have an Upgrading Gentoo article on the Gentoo wiki that describes in great detail how upgrades can be accomplished. But one of the …
The mix of libffi with other changes
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sun 03 November 2013I once again came across libffi. Not only does the libffi approach fight with SELinux alone, it also triggers the TPE (Trusted Path Execution) protections in grSecurity. And when I tried to reinstall Portage, Portage seemed to create some sort of runtime environment in a temporary directory as well, and …
Underestimated or underused: Portage (e)logging
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Wed 25 September 2013Within 30 minutes of each other, two people on the #gentoo channel
asked if Portage kept logs of the messages displayed during the build
and installation of a package. Of course, the answer is a sounding "yes"
- and depending on your needs, you can even save more of the logging …
Why our policies don't like emerge --config
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Fri 23 August 2013One of the features that Portage provides is to have post-processing
done on request of the administrator for certain packages. For instance,
for the dev-db/postgresql-server package we can call its
pkg_config() phase to create the PostgreSQL instance and configure it
so that the configuration of the database is stored …