Simple but useful control of packages files

[Kolokoltsev]

Hi all. An idea is to observe an installed files of each package in separate fs tree. To see where all it's files are installed (in real fs), and not to see files and directories that dont belong to the package you are not interested. It could be very usefoul for just installed packages, for example if you dont remember where could be it's config files, or even main executable )
We have an utility for observing package files. It is a part of app-portage/gentoolkit and it's name is "equery". But where to create a file system? We don't want to put any rubish in the root fs, and also it is not interesting to create a new partition for such thing. But... - thanks linux, we can create a new fs inside of any file... so :
_______________________________________________
dd if=/dev/sda of=/etc/portage/portagefs count=209715
mke2fs /etc/portage/portagefs
mount -o loop /etc/portage/portagefs /tmp/portagefs
_______________________________________________
..."count=209715" is nearly 100Mb

And a simple bash script for creating a dublicates (or images) of installed packages:

#!/bin/bash
if [ ! -d /tmp/portagefs/lost\+found ]; then
echo "Portage fs is not mounted"
exit 0
fi

if [ ! ${1} ]; then
echo "The only parameter is an exact package name"
fi

if [ ! `equery -q list -e ${1}` ]; then
echo "Package ${1} is not installed yet"
exit 0
fi

if [ ! -d /tmp/portagefs/${1} ]; then
mkdir /tmp/portagefs/${1}
fi


for path in $( equery files ${1} ); do
if [ -d $path ]; then
if [ ! -d /tmp/portagefs/${1}${path} ]; then
mkdir -v /tmp/portagefs/${1}${path}
fi
else
if [ ! -f /tmp/portagefs/${1}${path} ]; then
ln -sv ${path} /tmp/portagefs/${1}${path}
fi
fi
done
______________________________________________________________

So now you just run this script with the name of the package you want to observe, and
in the /tmp/portagefs will appear it's tree with symlinks. Then - any filemanager wil hellp you
to find a lot of interesting files from your package, about what you even didn't know ))))\

Finally I've just placed a commands into <Start button(IceWM button)>->Menu->Programs like
"krusader --left /etc/portagefs/opera/". (krusader is my filemanager)

Which solutions do you use for package control, viewing package trees etc. ?

[timeBandit]

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Gentoo Chat.
Not about Gentoo installation, not a support question, so moved here.
_________________
Plants are pithy, brooks tend to babble--I'm content to lie between them.
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[notHerbert]

Very interesting. I tried your recipe

[Kenji Miyamoto]

Doesn't Mac OS X do this to a degree? It seems to work pretty well for them, too.
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[ Kawa-kun, new and improved!! ]

Alex Libman seems to be more of an anarchist than a libertarian.

[Kolokoltsev]

I forgot to say about fstab..., so to mount this "virtual" fs each time you're entering in to the system - add line into /etc/fstab:

[timeBandit]

I'm intrigued by this but feel I'm still missing something. What does this offer that qlist and quickpkg do not? With qlist I can see all the files and directories created by installing a package, as notHerbert demonstrated. With quickpkg I can easily create a tarball of only the files in package foo, which is equivalent to tar czf foo.tgz -C /tmp/portagefs/foo . using this method.

Is there some other benefit I've overlooked?
_________________
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[shickapooka800]

how about instead of count=wierd number, use count=1 bs=1k seek=100k

[Kolokoltsev]

Well, correct. You can use qlist or equery or any other console utility with grep. It works pretty good, and I'm not speaking to forget such instruments. If you know what you are looking for - it is better and faster to speak thrue console. The main benefit of my propose is close to "mousekiller" solution. Will tell much clear. For example, I have IceWM, and can orgenaize in it's main menu about 10-20 folders for each GUI program that are in use. There not such a lot of keys, and defenetely there is a place for one more interactive utilitie - package tree.
In IceWM "proframs" file it looks like

[Kolokoltsev]

So, in two words the difference is like between "ls" command and "mc". Sometimes it is faster to ls, but sometimes it is better to use midnight. One more example: I want to find an icon for the worktable.
It is posslible to:

(don't remember the console command, but shure it's package name where with word "magick")

[Kolokoltsev]

[notHerbert]

Okay, so I run

[timeBandit]

Browsing the filesystem by package...cool indeed. That was the angle I didn't see. Thanks!

...and therefore,
Moved from Gentoo Chat to Documentation, Tips & Tricks.
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Plants are pithy, brooks tend to babble--I'm content to lie between them.
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[Bones McCracker]

Isn't this the idea behind one of the major features of Rox (application directories)?
http://roscidus.com/desktop/AppDirs