Specifying apps to update?

[NiBe]

I've quite recently migrated from slackware to gentoo linux on my main workstation and I am this far quite impressed, however I have a few problems with portage.

Due to the fact that the availability to broadband or DSL is quite limited here in Sweden, I'm stuck on a 56k-connection, thus running "emerge world" takes AGES.
What do I want? I would like to specify which apps to update/fetch ebuilds for, not fetch every single one of them! The FreeBSD ports-system, for example, lets you specify which categories of apps you want updated. If you don't want to update your database daemons/clients' makefiles you can simply comment them out. Have I missed a vital config in the portage system here?

Let's say that i want to update mplayer, is there any emerge-command I can run to simply get the latest ebuilds for mplayer and its dependencies (and the dependencies dependencies, and the dependencies dependencies dependencies.. and uh... you get the picture )?
Browsing around at packages.gentoo.org gives nice info about the ebuilds, but they're not downloadable.

I hope I'm understandable enough.

[Cobron]

If you say "emerge <appname>" (look in /usr/portage/ for a listing of available packages) it will download the program and its required dependencies to be able to compile and run that program.
To update mplayer, for instance, type "emerge -up mplayer" to see which files are required to upgrade.
"emerge -uDp" lists all files required + looks at all the dependencies and their dependencies and... to upgrade them as well.
"Emerge -uDp world" checks out all of your packages installed to see which are upgradeable, "emerge -up world" only checks out the packages which were manually installed.
leave out the "-p" in above commands to actually upgrade.

check out "man emerge" for more (better ) info.

[slais-sysweb]

Code: Select all

emerge -puv mplayer

or for deep dependencies

Code: Select all

emerge -puvD mplayer

It is usually better to only run emerge -pu world to find out what might be needed and then update only the things you really need.

[Genone]

Hmm, you say `emerge world` but from the text it sounds that you mean `emerge --sync`, is that correct ? If so then unfortunately the answer is no. You could update single packages/categories by running the rsync command yourself, however it won't check dependencies and is therefore not supported by portage itself.

[slais-sysweb]

If the original question was really one of how to minimise downloads on a slow connection the setting up an /etc/portage/rsync_excludes file and enabling it in /etc/make.conf may be part of the solution.

[NiBe]

Hmm, you say `emerge world` but from the text it sounds that you mean `emerge --sync`, is that correct ?

Uhm.. whoops... right you are, Genone!

slais-sysweb: Thanks for the tip, but the other solutions offered seem more viable to me.

I'll try this out as soon as I get my new parts for my workstation.

[hadfield]

For your emerge world request I just came up with a very basic bash script that can emerge everything and their dependencies from just a single specified group.

mergegroup.sh

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#!/bin/bash

GROUP=$1
EMERGE_OPTIONS=$2

APPS=$(emerge -p world | grep ${GROUP} | awk -F "]" '{print $2}' | sed 's/\(.*\) \[/\1/g' | sed 's/\(.*\)-[0-9].*/\1/g')
[ -z "${APPS}" ] && echo "No packages to emerge for group ${GROUP}" && exit 0   

emerge ${EMERGE_OPTIONS} ${APPS}

It greps the emerge -p world output for all packages in the specified group. Then it emerges them all. So if you want to fetch everything in sys-apps just run:

Code: Select all

./mergegroup.sh sys-apps "-f"

I also found this script that will just sync a specified category, however it won't sync their dependencies.
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=118345

Edited: January 9, 2004 19:48