What is it?

Semerge is a small frontend to Sportage that allows most users to manage packages effectively on their system. It has a very similar interface to emerge.

Current Features:

• Update both Sportage and Portage's internal databases.
• Search for packages, searching using substrings or using powerful regular expressions.
• Install and remove packages.
• Dependency calculation.
• Reverse dependency calculation.
• Redundant package finder.

Installation

At the moment, semerge comes as part of the sportage Gentoo package management library. Installing sportage will install semerge. In the future these two will be provided as separate packages.

Usage:

Ensure that the directory /etc/sportage/databases/ exists. This is where sportage puts its package cache. Please also ensure that a virtuals file is in /etc/sportage/. This virtuals file informs semerge what packages should be installed to fulfill certain virtual dependencies and also supports versions of packages. An example is here.

Also please create a file called /etc/sportage/semerge.conf. In here place the following configuration variables. An example can be found here.

• hardmasked packages = A regular expression list of all packages to be hardmasked by the user. No version support in here yet.
• unstable packages = A regular expression list of all packages to be marked unstable by the user. No version support in here yet.
• stable packages = A regular expression list of all packages to be marked stable by the user. No version support in here yet.
• accept keywords = The keyword that semerge should accept. Most of the time should be the same as in make.conf.
• use flags = The use flags to be used. Most of the time the output from emerge --info should be pasted here.
• clear cache = yes|no. This informs semerge whether to clear the old cache of available packages before refilling the database. This allows sportage to make correct decisions about packages whose metadata has been removed during a Portage update.

Please note that these directories and example configuration files are also included in the release in the sportage directory.

Execute with:

./semerge [OPTIONS] [PACKAGES]

--help (-h)	Displays the help page.
--sync	Update both the Portage and Sportage databases at once from an online rsync server.
--rebuildcache	Rebuilds the internal sportage cache of Packages that are available to be installed.
--afteremerge	Rebuilds the internal sportage cache of the Packages that are installed.
--rebuildall (-R)	Rebuilds all the internal sportage databases.
--search (-s)	Search all the package names and categories for [PACKAGES]
--unmerge (-C)	Remove [PACKAGES] from the system.
--deep (-D)	Update all the installed packages. Note, with semerge "semerge -puD" will update all packages on the system.
--emptytree (-e)	Does not use the sportage installed packages cache when calculating dependencies for [PACKAGES].
--fetchonly (-f)	Only fetch [PACKAGES], install them later.
--nodeps (-o)	Do not calculate dependencies of [PACKAGES], just install [PACKAGES] themselves.
--oneshot	Do not put [PACKAGES] in the world file.
--pretend (-p)	Print output showing what would happen if the operation was to go ahead.
--searchdesc (-S)	Search package descriptions for [PACKAGES].
--regexp (-r)	Use regular expressions when doing a search, instead of checking if the search only contains [PACKAGES].
--revdep	Find out what installed packages depend on [PACKAGES].
--update (-u)	Update [PACKAGES]. Will remerge if [PACKAGES] are already up to date.
--depclean	Remove all packages that are redundant on the system. This only looks to maintain the packages listed within the world file.
--purgedist (-d)	Remove all distfiles not required by installed packages.

Frequent Issues

The output from ebuild is in the incorrect order.

This is a known bug and we aren't sure what is causing this. If someone has any theories about how we can track this bug down or fix it, please contact us as soon as possible.

Changing values in semerge.conf does not alter semerge's behaviour.

Have you run semerge -R? The sportage database needs to be recreated when any of the package masking changes within semerge.conf.

Updating package X broke package Y.

Unfortunately semerge does not have the ability to check the integrity of the dependency tree when doing an update. This is a limitation of sportage and should be fixed soon.

Project Maintainer

If you want to help with the project, or have a problem and need help or anything like that, then by all means contact the maintainer at beastmcbeast at users.sourceforge.net.

Licence

The project is released under the GPL. The IPR rests with the University of Bath, England. Details can be found here.

Project Page

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/portage-sql.