Eix, syncing and overlays
April 27, 2009
This is a very quick tip for all Gentoo Portage users:
Eix is a very nice search utility for Portage (if you have not yet, do emerge eix), but with default settings it is a bit awkward if you constantly update its database — especially if you use overlays. There's two very simple "tricks" to make life easier.
First trick is to use eix-sync instead of emerge --sync; update-eix. Not only do you shorten your command(s), you also (by default) get a nice list of changes in the tree when the syncing and database updating is done.
The other trick is for people who also use overlays with Layman. To include syncing of overlays into Eix, just add
*
into a separate line in your /etc/eix-sync.conf file. Now whenever you run
eix-sync it will basically run emerge --sync; layman -S; eix-update and include package information from the overlays automatically into the Eix database as well.
comment
Excellent! Thanks.
update-eix-remote
Thanks very much for your "*" tip :D
I used to have the command sequence "sudo eix-sync $$ layman -S" as an alias in my .bashrc. Now I only have eix-sync ;)
I want to comment about update-eix-remote, hoping you have an answer.
a) If it is run *before* eix-sync, I lose the possibility of searching in non-installed overlays, but only in the installed ones.
b) If, on the other hand, update-eix-remote is run *after* eix-sync, the info regarding installed overlays is lost. In this latter case an "eix -I [package]" returns "No matches found" although [package] is installed from an overlay.
Do you know how to solve it?
Ramiro.
I have the same problem
Actually, I stumbled upon the same problem and haven't found time to either try to solve it or ask (elsewhere then on #gentoo@irc.freenode.net, where I got no anwer).
I suspect it's a bug, because it worked the first time just fine, but the next day when I ran 'emerge-sync' I lost the possibility to 'eix' in installed overlays. So far I'm stumped. I hope we soon find a solution...
Ha! Got it! :D
With joint forces (vekin on #gentoo@irc.freenode.net actually helped) I got the bugger. It's actually not a bug but a sloppily configured install (on my part at least).
You have to locate your Layman's make.conf and include that path into /etc/make.conf. In my case I had to put:
After that it worked like a charm :]
It seems that by default it reads only the /etc/make.conf and if you have overlays handled by Layman it doesn't look into those settings. So by adding that line you tell it to take into consideration Layman's settings as well.
I hope this solves your problem as well.