This is just a short page to point out some handy scripts to help with manually managing portage's emerge command when the package set is *very* large, such as "emerge -e world" as shown below:
emerge world -ev
...
something breaks
...
emerge world -ev --resume
The main problem occurs if you emerge something manually (to work around the breakage shown above) and forget to use --one-shot then the resume list is reset and the original package list is blown away. If you've ever wondered if you can save the resume list, well now you can. At this point, the list of packages to resume (ie, anything that wasn't successfully emerged the first time around) is stored as a Python "pickle" in /var/cache/edb/mtimedb so it's not the easiest thing to manipulate without some helper tools.
The following scripts will let you edit, save, and restore the emerge resume list if something drastic occurs during a large emerge operation. There are several reasons why you might want to do this; as a developer testing various ebuilds and systems, the advantages should be obvious, but as a user, you would mostly only need to do this if something goes wrong (as in the example above). The original forum thread with two of the scripts below shows another example.
Thanks to MonkeeSage and dberkholz for making their Python scripts available so the rest of us can take advantage of them in times of need.
Last updated 04/24/2010 12:43