Passing arguments to emerge for build only

[LIsLinuxIsSogood]

Hi yall,
I was just wondering how this might compare to the quickpkg command, which is to have portage rebuild all the packages and store in a new directory and in doing so be able to assure that if some of the system software was built a while ago (as was the case with some installs I just went through the process of updating the entire system, so now I know it is the case that some are old and some new).

So as a way of furthering efforts for future restore/recovery, isntead of using quickpkg to backup what's there I want to use emerge -e --buildpkgonly and set a new destination in order to save all these tbz2 files so that at least in terms of the packages installed on the system, I could restore from there in the future. Does what I'm saying make sense? Would some other flags perhaps help in order to ensure that all packages are built I would prefer to not include --keep-going.

I'm just checking since I've seen discussion about this capability for building binary packages on this forum revolve around system admin and installation, and on the topic of recovery and restoring. How does the idea hold up that I would be rebuilding the packages with the --everything flag, and maybe telling portage a new directory called 'Date=Today,Set=World' for all such binary packages to be stored.

I suppose if the idea worked out, then the next logical step would be to incorporate some possibility for cross compiling the packages and basically be able to clone the host to different target architectures, which as far as I know is possible, right?

[NeddySeagoon]

LIsLinuxIsSogood,

Think through you backup and restore strategy completely and what it is being used to guard against.

e.g. FEATURES=buildpkg saves everything on the local hard drive, so its not proof against HDD failure.
It is good for quickly downgrading something that installed but doesn't work, or something you uninstalled then realised it was a bad idea ... gcc, glibc and so on.

--buildpkgonly is probably not what you want. You can only --buildpkgonly if all the dependencies are already installed with the required dependencies and USE flags.

--buildpkd --with-bdeps=y -e is probably better as any required dependencies will be built too.
Yes, everything will be reinstalled. --keep-going is a good idea too, as it will let you pick up the pieces at the end.

There is a subtle difference between --buildpk and quickpkg.
The former, packages everything as it will be installed. The latter packages from your installed system.
The difference is in configuration files you have edited. quickpkg will save your secrets if you ask it to, you may or may not want that.

The default location is /usr/portage/packages but you can change that.
When you cross compile, starting with crossdev, it keeps everything separate for you. Target code goes into /usr/<CHOST>/packages.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.