Forcing package check

Some time ago, I'd begun to think that perhaps the Gentoo
package 
system on my SPARC had become somewhat corrupted. (Snip long
story 
about SunBlades and IDE corruption...) Queries concerning
installed 
packages seemed to execute correctly, but "emerge -uvD
world" seemed 
to ignore packages that really needed to be upgraded.

I finally got around to brute-forcing the portage system
into querying 
every single installed package to see if it was in need of
an update. 
The resulting pipe sequence is convoluted and takes a while
to run, 
but it seems to do the job. Oh, and you'll also need to
have the epm 
ebuild installed.

    epm -qGa |\
    sed -e 's/-r[0-9][0-9]*$//' -e 's/-[^-]*$//' |\
    sort -u |\
    (while read n; do emerge -puv "$n"; done)
|\
    grep -w ebuild

In semi-plain English, the procedure is

1. Get list of all installed ebuilds, complete with group
name
2. Remove release and version numbers from ebuild names
3. Remove duplicates, common with slotted ebuilds
4. Loop over each ebuild name looking for updates
5. Important output from emerge has word
"ebuild" in the string

Someone will probably now tell me that there's a nifty
prebuilt tool 
for this sort of work... 

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinleinmadboa.com <>
www.madboa.com

-- 
gentoo-sparcgentoo.org mailing list

Paul Heinlein wrote:
> Some time ago, I'd begun to think that perhaps the
Gentoo package system 
> on my SPARC had become somewhat corrupted. (Snip long
story about 
> SunBlades and IDE corruption...) Queries concerning
installed packages 
> seemed to execute correctly, but "emerge -uvD
world" seemed to ignore 
> packages that really needed to be upgraded.

This usually happens when this "important
package" was installed as a dependency 
of another package, and that other package is no longer
installed or just no 
longer depends on the first one. The real solution is to add
this important 
package to the world file. If a package isn't listed in the
world file and it's 
not a dependency of a package listed in the world file, it
won't be caught by 
'emerge -uD world'.

-- 
Andrew Gaffney                            http://dev.gentoo.or
g/~agaffney/
Gentoo Linux Developer                                  
Installer Project
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