How to use Kuroo? (It does not even update the package list)

[nagmat84]

How am I suppose to use Kuroo?

The question might sound silly, but after having emerged Kuroo I was not even able to get it running.

When I start Kuroo as a normal user, KDE (ksu) asks me for the root password as Kuroo wants to make a backup of some portage-related file to /var/cache/kuroo/backup. After I have entered the root password, another message dialog appears that Kuroo was not able to create the backup directory and Kuroo terminates. Great!

When I start Kuroo as root, Kuroo first presents me a warning that it is not necessary to start Kuroo as root, because Kuroo support ksu/kdesu. (Yes, well, that's what I tried in the first place.) After confirming that dialog, Kuroo is able to create the backup and I am presented with the main window. However, the package list is ridiculously outdated and includes packages which have long been gone from the official ebuild tree. (It even includes QT4 and KDE 4 packages). When I select such a package, Kuroo warns me that there is no ebuild for that package and Kuroo offers me to update its cache. So it seems that Kuroo does not work with the actual ebuild tree in /var/db/repos/gentoo/ directly, but comes with its own cache. Interestingly though that this cache seems to be populated with a decade old ebuild tree right after a fresh installation. When I trigger Kuroo to update its cache, Kuroo does "something", i.e. there is noticeable disk activity, but after a couple of minutes when Kuroo informs me that the cache has been updated, I still see the same outdated list of ebuilds and I am back to square one.

Yes, I understand that Kuroo is marked as "~amd64" and hence is considered to be in testing state. So I expect some issue here and there and maybe even a crash. But this has nothing to do with being unstable. This is unusable. As this is so obviously dysfunctional, I still believe that there must be something wrong with my installation.

[nagmat84]

I guess I found the issue: https://sourceforge.net/p/kuroo/bugs/64/

Kuroo relies on deprecated variables to be set in make.conf. So it is actually not a frontend to emerge (and equery), but Kuroo tries to parse make.conf and the ebuild repository itself. However, Kuroo did not stay astride with Portage development.

At the current state, Kuroo is not usable at all and should probably removed from the Gentoo Wiki at https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Portage#Alternate_package_managers_and_GUIs.

[Ralphred]

The only thing I ever used kuroo for was "package discovery", when it died I wrote this, but I'm literally half way through the python 3.12 upgrade so have no idea if it still works, feel free to try though (it works/worked on 3.11). It needs pyQt and eix installed.

[nagmat84]

[Ralphred]

[wjb]