Gentoo Package Management with Portage [LWN.net]

Gentoo Package Management with Portage

Posted Jun 10, 2004 4:54 UTC (Thu) by modernjazz (subscriber, #4185)
Parent article: Gentoo Package Management with Portage

I tend to run Debian systems installed through Knoppix, and one thing has
always bothered me: I'd like to be able to get security updates without
also updating all the other packages on my system (if it ain't broke...).
One can get security updates by following either "stable" or "unstable."
Unfortunately, "stable" is quite old and doesn't update many of the
packages found on Knoppix; and in "unstable" the packages seem
to be replaced rather often (for many reasons besides security), so
staying current involves a lot of "package churn."

Does Portage provide a way to run current software and apply security
updates without the amount of package churn I see in Debian unstable? Or
perhaps there's something I'm missing in how to configure apt?

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Gentoo Package Management with Portage

Posted Jun 10, 2004 6:24 UTC (Thu) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link]

You can backport Debian packages relatively easily (as easy as you can recompile Gentoo packages for older libraries) by doing 'apt-get -b source <source package name>'. You can pin, specify releases, whatever, the same way you do for binary pacakges; APT will download and compile the source package, and give you a .deb. If the source itself isn't dependant on a newer library version, it will work with your older libraries.

The 'apt-src' and 'apt-build' tools also give you a way to manage Debian as a set of source packages rather than binary ones.

Security Updateds Only?

Posted Jun 10, 2004 7:47 UTC (Thu) by Felix.Braun (subscriber, #3032) [Link]

Gentoo are working on an update command that will only pull in security related updates called glsa-check. The documentation states that there are currently some remaining shortcomings to be ironed out. I can't say for myself as I haven't used this yet.