Attn: robbat2, not bbullock, sorry -- Gentoo questions

[unixronin]

So here I am, finally getting around to installing Gentoo on an extra disk in babylon5, with the intention of migrating over to it altogether once I get it set up how I want.  Right now, I'm still running my Gentoo environment chrooted under my 2.4.31 kernel, until I have it fully set up.  Only, so far I'm running into a few setup problems I can't find answers to.

• I can get emerge to build Perl with ithreads enabled by placing 'dev-lang/perl ithreads' in /etc/portage/package.use.  I cannot get it to build Perl with ithreads, use64bitint, and uselongdouble enabled; it ignores all my attempts to do so.  How do I make it play nice in this regard, and keep doing so?
• Every time I emerge a package, it gives me a list of dependencies it will install.  Among this list, invariably it tells me that before proceeding, I should update portage to sys-apps/portage-2.0.51.22-r3 before proceeding, and that I can accomplish this by emerge -u portage.  When I then execute emerge -u portage, it tells me portage is up to date and there's nothing to do.  What's with this?
• All the documentation seems to indicate that udev, unlike devfs, offers no mechanism to address a device as (for example) /dev/sd/c1b0t5u0p4 instead of /dev/sdd4.  I hate and despise the /dev/sdx model; it's horribly broken, it's lame, and every time you insert a device, you have to figure out which other device identifiers are now going to point to different devices than they used to.  (I am in fact totally gobsmacked that, by kernel 2.6.14, Linux still uses the /dev/sdx model at all, even for legacy support.  I repeat and emphasize, it's HORRIBLY BROKEN and should be considered harmful.)  Is there any means that the Gentoo installation handbook just isn't bothering to tell me about, by which I can tell udev to use fully specified device identifiers that I can safely rely on to always point to the same physical device?

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh, I guess my memory was at fault ... I was thinking it was bbullock who was the gentoo dev, not you.

Perl -- building with ithreads works fine, I just can't get it to also enable use64bitint and uselongdouble. midi pointed out that this is because the ebuild does not recognize those options, and that I should bug a developer to get them included. (Saaaaaaayyyyyyyy.....!) :)

Portage:

babylon5 / # emerge -pv portage

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild R ] sys-apps/portage-2.0.51.22-r3 -build (-selinux) 0 kB

Total size of downloads: 0 kB
babylon5 / # emerge -u portage
Calculating dependencies ...done!
>>> Auto-cleaning packages ...

>>> No outdated packages were found on your system.

* GNU info directory index is up-to-date.

And thanks for the devfs/udev info; done. :)

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

I don't see the portage error you mentioned about it wanting .51.22-r3 repeatedly.
My perl builds with use64bitint, but not uselongdouble. File a feature request in the bugzilla, and I'll bug our perl mongers about it.
The perl build system isn't something I've hacked at before.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, if after doing both of those, I emerge -eav dcron syslog-ng xfsprogs jfsutils slocate:

babylon5 / # emerge -eav dcron syslog-ng xfsprogs jfsutils slocate

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies ...done!
...
...
[ebuild N ] sys-apps/sandbox-1.2.12 0 kB
[ebuild N ] sys-apps/portage-2.0.51.22-r3 -build (-selinux) 0 kB
*** Please update portage to the above version before proceeding.
Failure to do so may result in failed or improper merges.
A simple 'emerge -u portage' is sufficient.
...
...


Every time I try to emerge ANYTHING, it tells me to update portage first, as above. So I try to update it, just lke it told me, and it says there's nothing to be done.

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

Your error is this: "emerge -eav"
-e tells portage to treat your system as empty and re-merge everything.
So the above output is correct given that -e was specified.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

AHA! I overgeneralized from tww1fa's instructions to me on pre-installing gcc-3.4.4, and somehow failed to catch my error when I read the man page. Thanks!

Er, sorry, take 2

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I just found an ebuild error. The gnumeric emerge (not gentoolkit) pulls in libmpeg3, and libmpeg3 requires nasm to build, but does not have nasm listed as a dependency. Therefore on a new system that does not yet have nasm, installing gnumeric will fail.

Re: Er, sorry, take 2

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

*points to bugzilla*