On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 1:00 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Saturday 26 April 2008, Mark Knecht wrote:

>  default so it's really slow). I'm thinking of these things:
>
>  - Install every currently installed ebuild to an overlay, or install
>  specific ebuilds or specific categories to an overlay.
>  - Copy an installed ebuild and it's entire installed DEPEND tree to an
>  overlay - this is for cases where <arb_lib> is not in world but is
>  required as a deep dependency of something that is. The user will
>  probably not be aware of this dependency and not having that ebuild
>  will break stuff.

>  - Copy an entire profile to an overlay

>  - Copy everything in an installed ebuild's SRC_URI (or all installed
>  ebuilds) to a different DISTDIR for safety (think ATI driver downloads
>  or kernels here)

> 
>  - Remove old ebuilds and profiles from the overlay that you have since
>  upgraded
>  - Possibly more
>

  Here's my idea: How hard would it be to have eix-test-obsolete
verify against the global database instead of the local database? If I
ran it that way  *before* I ran emerge --sync then it would tell me
effectively which packages would be removed after syncing. I could
then move what I need to move by hand, run emerge --sync, and I'd
still be clean because I've saved my files into my private overlay
before the sync operation can delete them.

  If an enhancement like that is fairly simple - I have no idea -
then that would be a great start. Still, it's not protection against
the root cause of the problem, but it's a simple way to see ahead of
time what might happen.

Cheers,
Mark