"Pause" feature for emerge

[gspr]

I don't know if this has been proposed already, but wouldn't a pause feature for emerge be nice?
Take for instance upgrading the Xorg package, or some other intrusive upgrade. Wouldn't it be nice if one could pass a --pause to emerge that would cause it to stop just before copying in all the files from the image directory, and wait for user confirmation to procede? This would allow for users to for example exit Xorg before changes are actually made to the system.

[adaptr]

This is not necessary - all emerge upgrades that do not require a restart to take effect are completely transparent.

If you want to implement this now just run emerge with --buildonly; this causes the binary package to be built but not merged.

To pause an emerge just pause it; ctrl-z to stop the process, fg to restart it.

[BlackEdder]

I guess with completely transparent he means that you can savely leave xorg running while emerging xorg.

[russianpirate]

That is like saying can I use a new kernel when my old one is loaded.

[andrewd18]

That's right. The Unix filesystem is great that way... you can delete a file that's actually in use by a program, for example, an OOo text document. You can have it open in OOo, delete it with rm <filename>, and you can still make changes to it and save normally, in OOo.

Unix filesystems lock the file instead of removing it, so programs that already have it open can still modify it. Then, once no programs are using it, the file is completely removed.

So for example, you could upgrade X.org while running X.org... the old X.org build files will be locked, and then when you restart X, the old files will be unused (cuz the new one is now running), and within a few minutes, deleted.

~~ Andrew D.

[allucid]

That is like saying can I use a new kernel when my old one is loaded.

This is not necessary - all emerge upgrades that do not require a restart to take effect are completely transparent.

[arnvidr]

To pause an emerge just pause it; ctrl-z to stop the process, fg to restart it.

Is it possible to pause it, restart, and then emerge --resume or something?

[adaptr]

Not directly, but if you use ccache the already-processed bits will not take much time to compile.

[ChojinDSL]

What would be really cool is if you could pause or hibernate an emerge, power off your pc, power it back on and then resume your emerge. Would be very useful in cases where something warrants a reboot, or if you had a laptop and need to unplug it for a while.

[GentooBox]

well, you could use the keepwork and keeptemp features of emerge.

just put in:

FEATURES="keepwork keeptemp"

in make.conf

normally when you emerge something, it will put the files into /var/tmp/portage/<name> and when you stop the merge and restart it, it will delete the /var/tmp/portage/<name> folder and unpack the files from the tar files.

but with keepwork and keeptemp, the files will be there when you restart the merge and it will not compile the "pre"-compiled files unless you changed useflags.

the downside is that the files will take up huge amount of space after a while, so you should delete the folders manually when not needed.

[arnvidr]

That won't do...at least for me. The only time I would need this if I can't let the computer sit and compile overnight, but the emerge isn't finished. I don't know how long it takes until after I've sync'ed anyway, and then I just go ahead no matter what...

[dundas]

well, you could use the keepwork and keeptemp features of emerge.

just put in:

FEATURES="keepwork keeptemp"

in make.conf

normally when you emerge something, it will put the files into /var/tmp/portage/<name> and when you stop the merge and restart it, it will delete the /var/tmp/portage/<name> folder and unpack the files from the tar files.

but with keepwork and keeptemp, the files will be there when you restart the merge and it will not compile the "pre"-compiled files unless you changed useflags.

the downside is that the files will take up huge amount of space after a while, so you should delete the folders manually when not needed.

This sounds great, so that I won't boil my computer overnight! hope it won't save other tmp files except the portage ones, thank you!

[djh-world]

You could always use the handy GNU Screen.

Start the emerge in a screen session, then detach it, exit X then just re attach it.

No need for a pause.

[djm]

Surely keepwork/keeptemp only affect what happens when an emerge exits successfully

If it fails, nothing gets deleted from $PORTAGE_TMPDIR

Afaik there's no way of stopping emerge --resume from starting the current package from scratch (I might be wrong though), but you can do ebuild /usr/portage/cat-egory/package/package-ver.ebuild merge, and the merge of the package will be completed without starting again.

However, packages won't be added to your world file if you do this (note: that only normally happens if it's something you explicitly emerged, and not if it's only emerged as a dep), so you can do emerge -n package to add the package to your world file without re-compiling it.

ebuild .. merge only does one package though - anything that was supposed to be merged afterwards you'll need to ask to be emerged again (you could do emerge --resume --skipfirst, fex)

[peterton]

I know it's a bit of an old thread, but I thought I'd share my experiences anyway.
I wanted to build openoffice-ximian-1.3.16 on a machine which I couldn't leave powered on until the build was finished. I started the build like so:

Code: Select all

PORTAGE_TMPDIR=/home emerge -Ov openoffice-ximian

I wanted to use openoffice-ximian-bin in the meantime, therefore the -O. I have more space free on my /home partition, therefore the PORTAGE_TMPDIR=/home.
When it was time to leave, I'd CTRL+C and powered off. The next day I did:

Code: Select all

FEATURES="keepwork keeptemp" PORTAGE_TMPDIR=/home emerge -Ov openoffice-ximian

... but it gave me an error about not being able to write to a dir. I interrupted during the psprint project. In order to make it compile and continue, I needed:

Code: Select all

while(true); do mkdir slo slb lib bin class misc obj inc 2>/dev/null; done

This was executed in /home/portage/openoffice-ximian-1.3.16/work/OOo_1.1.5/psprint/unxlngi4.pro.