Why the hell does portage depend on tar?

Shadow Skill · Veteran Joined: 04 Dec 2004 Posts: 1023

Seriously why is it that Portage basically needs tar in order to be able to do much in the way of anything? I accidentally downgraded Glibc [Its only after I realize my box is totally screwed that I found out that downgrading glibc isn't a good thing to do.] and I am busy trying to ressurect portage and probably a quarter of my box at the moment and I cannot help but think how easy it would be to just unzip a glibc zip archive and have the thing build and install and presto box=teh fixed. But of course that isn't the case instead Portage is rendered useless which means that I have to go through the extract stage tarball emerge -e system bull or find a way to get the sources for glibc2.4 onto my desktop and then install it. What is more has anyone ever noticed how the makers of the tar program actually package thier releases as tar files isn't it kind of like saying "sorry you need Gentoo installed in order to actually install Gentoo in the first place."? I think I will file a feature request for a way for portage to neatly override a broken tar and use some other archive formats to extract sources so that they [hopefully] can be rebuilt so that things like tar and other apps that need a given version of glibc can be made to work without all the song and dance.

Ps. I know ebuilds need not actually use tar I just couldn't think of a better way to put it.
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Wa ga kage waza ni kanau mono nashi.
Wa ga ichigeki wa mutekinari.

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erikm · l33t Joined: 08 Feb 2005 Posts: 634

Or, in the future, just activate the "static" USE flag for the tar ebuild...

cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3355

just use busybox, it has all the tools you need
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Moved from Off the Wall
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mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3224

cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3355

Shadow Skill · Veteran Joined: 04 Dec 2004 Posts: 1023

Exactly Cokehabit I've managed to get things to untar by hacking ebuild.sh and pointing tar to /bin/busybox tar but now glibc2.4-r1 wont build keeps complaining about makeinfo and telling me to use --force to preserve lbc.info when it gets around to building the documentation. [I forgot to copy the error down, I'll paste it when it fails again in about an hour or two.] Right now I am just building things against 2.3.6 until I figure out what the problem is with 2.4.
Update:
Hmm after screwing around with coreutils and such Glibc successfully installed, everything appears to be working again.
_________________
Ware wa mutekinari.
Wa ga kage waza ni kanau mono nashi.
Wa ga ichigeki wa mutekinari.

"First there was nothing, so the lord gave us light. There was still nothing, but at least you could see it."

cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3355

yeah, you dont have to say it, i know i'm god

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