General question on updates that require special action

[tld]

The other day I did my usual emerge -auD world, and just by chance I happened to notice the message that the openssl upgrade required two specific revdep-rebuilds (before the subsequent emerge scrolled it away). Maybe there's something here I've just missed that mentions that, but I could have easily missed that altogether.

I usually tend to find out about those sort of things from forum stickies etc (often in varying forums), but was wonderring if there's any one place that I'm not aware of that warns about any upcoming updates that require (or might require) special user action...say just before they get marked stable for example.

Thanks in advance.

Tom

[Omega21]

I just keep in mind that if you dont often update world, you may very well need some special action.
Im not saying you dont do it often, but for those of you who do it once every 6 months like me. XD

[tld]

I generally update world at least once a week, but either way there are occasionally updates that aren't completely automatic.

Tom

[hitachi]

tld said:

I usually tend to find out about those sort of things from forum stickies etc (often in varying forums), but was wonderring if there's any one place that I'm not aware of that warns about any upcoming updates that require (or might require) special user action...say just before they get marked stable for example.

I think this is a good point. Today I did a

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emerge -DuavN world

and had a experiance like you. Said I need to

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emerge glibc

- I think -. It was so fast while cooking so I was not able to realy read it.

Or dose anyone has a script which keeps all these mesages and one can read them after emerge is ready?

[chuanshi]

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# This sets what to log
PORTAGE_ELOG_CLASSES="warn error log"
# And this is how to do it
PORTAGE_ELOG_SYSTEM="save"

putting that in your make.conf will log all those messages in your /var/log/portage/elog folder

[tabanus]

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# This sets what to log
PORTAGE_ELOG_CLASSES="warn error log"
# And this is how to do it
PORTAGE_ELOG_SYSTEM="save"

putting that in your make.conf will log all those messages in your /var/log/portage/elog folder

This is something that's bugged me for a long time now. That technique creates a new file for every package emerged, which I've found is not very convenient, especially if a lot of packages have been updated. There is a way to have it all go in one file, which would be much easier to inspect after every update, but I've never managed to get it to work. Does anyone have a good hand-holding how-to on how to achieve this?

[Genone]

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# This sets what to log
PORTAGE_ELOG_CLASSES="warn error log"
# And this is how to do it
PORTAGE_ELOG_SYSTEM="save"

putting that in your make.conf will log all those messages in your /var/log/portage/elog folder

This is something that's bugged me for a long time now. That technique creates a new file for every package emerged, which I've found is not very convenient, especially if a lot of packages have been updated. There is a way to have it all go in one file, which would be much easier to inspect after every update, but I've never managed to get it to work. Does anyone have a good hand-holding how-to on how to achieve this?

Easiest option is probably to use (untested)

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PORTAGE_ELOG_SYSTEM=custom
PORTAGE_ELOG_COMMAND="somescript.sh \${LOGFILE} \${PACKAGE}"

in make.conf and write a small script like

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#!/bin/sh
logfile=/var/log/portage/lastmerge.elog

date >> $logfile
echo $2 >> $logfile
cat $1 >> $logfile

Other options could use the syslog module or writing a custom elog module.

[mpagano]

I wrote a small script to assist in viewing these logs since I also felt it was a bit unwieldly to go through each file manually.

The script is on bugzilla and it's called elog-list.

hth,
Mike

[tabanus]

Easiest option is probably to use (untested)

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PORTAGE_ELOG_SYSTEM=custom
PORTAGE_ELOG_COMMAND="somescript.sh \${LOGFILE} \${PACKAGE}"

in make.conf and write a small script like

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#!/bin/sh
logfile=/var/log/portage/lastmerge.elog

date >> $logfile
echo $2 >> $logfile
cat $1 >> $logfile

Great. That works. At last an easy to manage post-install log file. Thanks

[tld]

Thanks! I just noticed that the current make.conf.example shows examples like that. Note however that they indicate you should make sure to single quote the variables:

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# PORTAGE_ELOG_COMMAND: only used with the "custom" logging module. Specifies a command
#                      to process log messages. Two variables are expanded:
#                          ${PACKAGE} - expands to the cpv entry of the processed 
#                                       package (see $PVR in ebuild(5))
#                          ${LOGFILE} - absolute path to the logfile
#                                               Both variables have to be quoted with single quotes
#PORTAGE_ELOG_COMMAND="/path/to/logprocessor -p '\${PACKAGE}' -f '\${LOGFILE}'"

Thanks again for all the replies.

Tom

[SirYes]

This is really useful stuff!
Finally no more hand-made /root/messages/* files!
(yeah, that's a poor man's elog substitute )

I've ended up with this:

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# Emerge logging: this sets what to log
PORTAGE_ELOG_CLASSES="warn error log"
# Emerge logging: and this is how to do it
#PORTAGE_ELOG_SYSTEM="save custom"
PORTAGE_ELOG_SYSTEM="custom"
# Emerge logging: a command to process log messages
PORTAGE_ELOG_COMMAND="/usr/local/bin/elog-single '\${PACKAGE}' '\${LOGFILE}'"

whereas the custom logging script is:

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#!/bin/sh
LOGFILE=/var/log/portage/single.elog

(echo -n ">>> " ; date) >> ${LOGFILE}
echo ">>> $1" >> ${LOGFILE}
cat $2 >> ${LOGFILE}

It works, at least for me. Thousand thanks, Genone!

[Edit]
I also added this logrotate script:

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#
# elog-single logrotate snippet for Gentoo Linux
#

/var/log/portage/single.elog {
  rotate 3
  size=512k
}

[Genone]

A bit late, but should note that portage-2.1.2 has a new "save_summary" module that stores all messages in /var/log/portage/elog/summary.log (therefore making the script I posted above obsolete).