About Source Mage [LWN.net]

About Source Mage

Posted Aug 15, 2005 15:42 UTC (Mon) by Zenith (subscriber, #24899)
In reply to: About Source Mage by Duncan
Parent article: About Source Mage

> Of course, I quickly set up aliases for emerge --verbose --pretend (and
> --ask), as ea (and ep), with corresponding --update --deep world aliases,
> plus others, but that's just because I'm lazy and don't want to type out
> the long forms. I suppose most folks come up with similar command line
> shortcuts, customized to the way they work, in time.

You mean such as "emerge -avuDN world" ?
a = ask
v = verbose
u = update
D = deep
N = new use

Why make your own aliases when "man emerge" will show you shorthands for just about all the commands there are?
An oversight on your part? Or are you just tired of having to write "emerge " :-)

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About Source Mage

Posted Aug 15, 2005 16:38 UTC (Mon) by komarek (guest, #7295) [Link]

Heh, that's all you need, emerge -avuDN. =-) This thread kind of makes a point about Gentoo usability. Things you want all the time are made more difficult than they should be. Other points:

o Sometimes you need -U, so that it won't undo updates you have made.
o Sometimes packages block emerge, and you have to manually remove them (even though they will be automatically replaced)
o Emerging by path is far, far easier than editing the stuff /etc/make.profile (which is not that well documented anyway). Of course, emerging by path is *deprecated* and you get *nasty warnings* when you do it, and you have to *wait 10 seconds* before it starts, just to find out that it won't automatically suck in other masked deps.

There are a lot of good reasons to use Gentoo. But I sometimes feel as though the developers must not be using it themselves, since they (as a group) continue to make decisions that make using Gentoo unpleasant.