Portage on SGI/IRIX (Portix?)

srcshelton · n00b Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 22 Location: Cambridge

I've been toying with using Portage as a secondary package manager on IRIX for some time now, but the old Portage's very limited alternative-root support meant that I didn't get very far.

Now that Portage 2.1 has been released, I've had much more luck - with ROOT=/usr/gentoo and PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT=/usr/gentoo - in getting Portage to work correctly, and as a non-root user! Infact, I can now "emerge --sync", "emerge --metadata", and "emerge -pv" and "emerge -f" a package - and all work

This required a few hacks to ensure that the value of ROOT wasn't forgotten, and some items (such as DISTDIR) don't seem to have the default values that make.conf suggests they do (for example, if DISTDIR isn't manually specified, it defaults to "/").

(I really should diff my lib/portage directory with the stock one, to find out exactly what I've done...)

I guess that the next step is to work out a sane "default-irix" profile. If anyone has any suggestions for how to best approach this (clone the default-darwin profile and change where necessary?) then any assistance is appreciated.

If anyone wants to have a play with what I've built so far, then I've packed it all into a tarball that will recreate /usr/gentoo. You can download this from here: http://files.irix-tools.homeunix.net/irix/portix.tar.bz2 [28Mb]
(Although note that this was compiled for R14k processors, and so may not work on anything R12k or below. Having said this, there are only about 3 packages installed, and their source still exists in /usr/gentoo/tmp/portage - so they can easily be rebuilt)

Cheers,

Stuart

cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3355

can i suggest you post this to the gentoo-mips list, they would be able to help you out a lot more.
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Redhatter · Posted: Fri Jul 14, 2006 12:49 am Post subject:

cokehabit: Actually no, srcshelton will get more assistance here. The Gentoo/MIPS list is specifically covering Linux... very few of us have anything to do with IRIX, so are unlikely to be able to help.

srcshelton: I'd say you're on the right track. If in doubt, pester the people in #gentoo-portage, they might be able to help with portage specifics, as well as #gentoo-dev-help.

This will be interesting though. I might see about acquiring IRIX (I've got a partial disc-set) for my O2 (get it dual-booting) and fiddling with this myself.
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srcshelton · n00b Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 22 Location: Cambridge

I'm now at the stage where I cam successfully compile packages - my major remaining hurdle now is that I'm trying to keep the portage tree owned by portage:portage, and run as a 'portage' user. This is so that I can't accidentally overwrite any vital system files with an emerge. What happens currently is that portage creates files and parent directories owned by root:portage, and then everything breaks come the live-filesystem install.

Does portage have any support for running as a user other than root?

I'll investigate further when I get time...

96140 · Retired Dev Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 1324

srcshelton · n00b Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 22 Location: Cambridge

Yeah - but even with these features enabled, portage chown's files owned by itself to root, then can't install them because it no longer has the correct permissions!

(This may be because there is (currently?) no sandbox for IRIX - but I get the impression that being root was a fundamental design assumption for Portage)

96140 · Retired Dev Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 1324