Portage (Funtoo)

Introduction

Portage is the official package manager of Funtoo Linux. Daniel Robbins maintains a slightly different version from upstream Gentoo Linux, with support for mini-manifests.

Portage Commands

emerge

high-level dependency-based package merge/unmerge tool

ebuild

lower-level package build tool

Portage Specifications

The latest progress and changes related to EAPI/PMS and Portage can often be found in the Gentoo Council meeting logs, which are listed on the Gentoo Council page.

The latest PMS specification to be approved by the Gentoo Council is available: eapi-3-approved-2010-01-18. The PMS specification is an attempt to codify the inner workings of Portage, and is authored by Ciaran McCreesh and Stephen Bennett as a Gentoo-hosted project.

Portage Profiles

Portage uses profiles to define settings for various architectures and types of Funtoo/Gentoo systems. See the Portage Profiles page for detailed information on how Portage handles profiles.

Portage Variables

Portage's behavior can be controlled by a number of configuration settings other variables that can be defined within the ebuild itself. In addition, a number of these variables are defined for the ebuild automatically by Portage. These variables are now documented on their own page: Portage Variables.

Multiple ABI Support

Portage contains support for multiple ABIs (Application Binary Interfaces) co-existing on the same system. This functionality has been extensively documented and has been moved to its own page: Multiple ABI Support.

Ebuild Functions

An ebuild developer has the ability to define Ebuild Functions that define steps to perform during a particular part of the ebuild lifecycle. These steps are now documented on their own page: Ebuild Functions .

Funtoo Portage Development

The Funtoo Core Team is currently working on a general-purpose plug-in system so that the GNU info file regeneration, news update display, and scanning of files that need updating in /etc can be pulled out of the official Portage emerge code. In addition, this plug-in system will allow other types of things to be hooked into various phases of emerge. This will allow various new plug-ins to be developed and used on systems, such as periodic security checks, etc.

TODO

Add support to portage, so that when an ebuild is merged, the /var/db/pkg entry contains a list of all currently-installed versions of all ebuilds upon which that ebuild RDEPENDs. This, combined with a comprehensive set of past USE settings (may need to implement this too,) can be used to detect when an ebuild needs to be rebuilt. This could help to address issues like those in Gentoo Bug 167662 and allow easier implementation of support for things like perl-cleaner. Currently, perl-cleaner doesn't detect that vim uses perl and moving from -ithreads to ithreads causes vim to die, so it needs to be manually rebuilt.

Add support for portage to understand which version of a particular app is the "active" version that it was built against, and record this information in /var/db/pkg. This can help to implement perl-cleaner-like support in Portage.

Funtoo Features/Changes

In git

removal of emerge-webrsync, rsync code, and all related rsync variables and features

Not needed with git-based trees

initial tree clone from SYNC variable

Our Portage now finally supports the ability to initially clone a Portage tree using the git repository defined in the SYNC variable

In Funtoo stable/unstable Portage

emerge --sync from git

If a git-based Portage tree is already in place, emerge --sync will run "git pull" to update the underlying Portage tree. If one is not in place, the contents of the SYNC variable will be used as the remote URI from which to clone a git tree (2.2). In addition, SYNC_USER and SYNC_UMASK (defaulting to root and 022) can be used to define the user account to use for cloning/syncing, as well as the umask to use. (2.2).

Sed Wrapper Symlink and PATH fix

The Funtoo version of Portage has replaced the BSD-only sed wrapper with a symlink. This will eventually be deprecated. The sed wrapper was a way to provide BSD systems with a "sed" command that could be used inside ebuilds that worked similarly to GNU sed. A PATH fix has been applied so that /bin/sed will be detected first anyway.

mini-manifest

Funtoo's Portage supports a special mode of operation where Manifests only contain digests for distfiles and not for files in the Portage tree. This is to eliminate redundant digests since git already provides SHA1 digests. This feature is currently enabled by adding "mini-manifest" to FEATURES in /etc/make.conf but the intention is to eventually move it to a repo-specific option. Funtoo provides a special "mini-manifest" tree that is smaller than the full-size Portage tree, and is intended to be used with the mini-manifest feature.

preserve bindist through USE filtering

Normally, anything not in an ebuild's IUSE is stripped from the USE passed to ebuild.sh. This patch allows "bindist" to not be stripped, so it can be used as a means to disable pre-merge sanity checks that may exist in pkg_setup() and pkg_pretend() but will not otherwise affect the resultant build. If "bindist" will affect some functionality in the package, then it should be added to an ebuild's IUSE. This patch allows pkg_setup() and pkg_pretend() to look for "bindist", which indicates that the ebuild is being built for release, typically in an automated fashion, and thus runtime sanity checks that might otherwise run can be optionally skipped. This check is used by the udev-160-r1.ebuild to see if we should fail if we are merging udev on a system where the kernel will not support it. In Metro, this is not a big deal, but on a real production system, merging the udev on an incompatible system will render the kernel inoperable.

safetydance FEATURE

A new FEATURE setting is used by Funtoo's udev ebuild called "safetydance" which can be used to manually bypass sanity checks. This is an alternative to the "bindist" approach above. udev-160 in Funtoo Linux supports both approaches and Metro sets "safetydance" by default.

GLEP 55 removal

Some code to support GLEP 55 has been removed.

new metadata format (experimental)

Some tweaks to ebuild.sh have been made so that it is easier to support new metadata formats in the future.

xz-utils auto-dependency

There are several ebuilds in the Gentoo Portage repository that use .xz files but do not explicitly depend on xz-utils. A workaround has been added to ebuild.sh to add this dependency to metadata automatically if a .xz file exists in SRC_URI. This change is not yet in the official Portage sources but is being used on the Funtoo side when generating our git-based Portage trees.

<issues/>