Discussion: How about an emerge --automatic option?

[henri]

Hi folks,

when the kde-meta packages arrived, I thought, Yessss... this is for me and my laptop!
Because I use my machine as a development box, I update most libraries and some things like kde and my multimedia programs quite often.

Now I just wanted to re-emerge kde-artwork, but emerge told me, almost all installed kde-meta ebuilds would block this.
No problem, I know how to help myself, but let's gess, I would like to switch back to the pure kde package instead of kde-meta.

I would have to unmerge kde meta totally bevore I could re-emerge all the same packages as the pure kde package.

Wouldn't it be nice if we would have an --automatic option which would find out for meta-packeges which depending packages could stay and which will be needed to be unmerged to emerge the package we want? Of course, this will be an option which would also include a "force" behaviour, so it might be dangerous if the same command would not be run befor with the --prepend option.

So: This should only be an optional behaviour, so who uses it will know what he/she's doing...

But an intelligent behaviour of such an option could reduce the need to re-emerge already installed packages a lot!
Just think of the kde example!

On the other hand, imho, such an option would bring the portage system a big step towards the automation of system upgrades:
Let's say we are a company which sell some kind of computer with a special software setup based on Gentoo.
Or, let's say we are a company which resells Rack-Systems, all configured equaly?
Now we would like to give our customers a kind of firmware-update, the we could invoke a simple...
emerge -uD my-companys-update-preparations && emerge -uD --newuse world && emeerge -uD my-companies-config-updates
...where my-companys-update-preparations and my-companies-config-updates are own ebuilds where we invoke some setup-specific commands.
The last setup-specific ebuild could invoke one or two last revdep-rebuild s and the collect some data (maybe again with emerge -uDp --newuse world and revdep-rebuild -p) to log it down and/or send it by email or some other connection to my company's customers-update-service-control-department's secretary... nice

Unfortunately I don't have the time at the moment to spend some more time on this topic, but maybe someone will be inspired and has some need for the ideas and some spare time? - What do you think about such an option?

Many thanks for every reply,
yours Henri Schomäcker

[kallamej]

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[LinuxJoe]

Couldnt you write a shells cript that does that for you?

I agree that it might be a good idea for meta ebuilds, but for customized ones i think just something like

[nesl247]

For the kde-meta package, what would make more sense is to detect what packages are installed via the meta package. Then portage would emerge the new package which is all built together, emerge it to the system, and unmerge the meta ones. So just like when it uninstalls an old package, except that the old package unmerge would be replaced with the unmerge of the meta packages.

Sorry if that was a bit confusing, but I couldn't think of how else to say it.