"Gentoo's standout contribution to software management is Portage." (10 words- Can be used as a software summary)
Portage is a software management tool developed by Gentoo that has become one of its most notable innovations. This tool is known for its high flexibility and extensive feature set, making it a preferred choice among Linux enthusiasts who require an efficient and reliable software management solution.
Portage is coded using Python and Bash scripting languages, which makes it fully visible to users. Users can easily manage their software through Portage's emerge tool. However, this review does not intend to provide detailed information on emerge tool. Interested users can refer to the man page of emerge for an in-depth understanding of the tool's functionality.
Along with the standard features, Portage has additional features that enhance the Gentoo experience, such as improving performance, reliability, and security. To enable these features, the user needs to edit the FEATURES variable available in the /etc/make.conf file. The FEATURES variable contains various feature keywords that must be separated by white space. In most cases, additional tools must be installed to use the features.
Although this review covers some of the features available in Portage, it's important to note that there are many more. Users can refer to the make.conf man page to get a complete understanding of what the tool has to offer.
This latest release of Portage includes a variety of new and exciting features such as the "confcache" integration to enable global caching, the elog framework, and accompanying modules for logging ebuild warnings, errors, and general notices. In addition, the tool has added an "elog" function, which can replace "einfo" in many cases, version syntax enhancements that allow multiple suffixes, a new "cvs" prefix for "live sources" ebuilds, and support for config files as directories.
The tool also refactored the cache, allowing for a runtime improvement from 35% to 65%. Portage now intelligently handles and displays USE_EXPAND-based IUSE variables, downloads in parallel to the compilation with the "parallel-fetch" feature, and includes a "changed or new" USE flag output when --verbose isn't specified.
Apart from these new features, this release has also included many improvements such as allowing packages to be upgraded that are only depended on via a "|| ( =cat/pkg-1* =cat/pkg-2* )" construct, distfiles indirection, atomic file updates, and global updates and fixpackages performance optimizations.
Overall, Portage is a powerful software management tool with extensive features that can handle complex software management tasks. The latest release includes many new features and improvements that make this tool even more flexible, efficient, and reliable than ever before.
Portage is coded using Python and Bash scripting languages, which makes it fully visible to users. Users can easily manage their software through Portage's emerge tool. However, this review does not intend to provide detailed information on emerge tool. Interested users can refer to the man page of emerge for an in-depth understanding of the tool's functionality.
Along with the standard features, Portage has additional features that enhance the Gentoo experience, such as improving performance, reliability, and security. To enable these features, the user needs to edit the FEATURES variable available in the /etc/make.conf file. The FEATURES variable contains various feature keywords that must be separated by white space. In most cases, additional tools must be installed to use the features.
Although this review covers some of the features available in Portage, it's important to note that there are many more. Users can refer to the make.conf man page to get a complete understanding of what the tool has to offer.
This latest release of Portage includes a variety of new and exciting features such as the "confcache" integration to enable global caching, the elog framework, and accompanying modules for logging ebuild warnings, errors, and general notices. In addition, the tool has added an "elog" function, which can replace "einfo" in many cases, version syntax enhancements that allow multiple suffixes, a new "cvs" prefix for "live sources" ebuilds, and support for config files as directories.
The tool also refactored the cache, allowing for a runtime improvement from 35% to 65%. Portage now intelligently handles and displays USE_EXPAND-based IUSE variables, downloads in parallel to the compilation with the "parallel-fetch" feature, and includes a "changed or new" USE flag output when --verbose isn't specified.
Apart from these new features, this release has also included many improvements such as allowing packages to be upgraded that are only depended on via a "|| ( =cat/pkg-1* =cat/pkg-2* )" construct, distfiles indirection, atomic file updates, and global updates and fixpackages performance optimizations.
Overall, Portage is a powerful software management tool with extensive features that can handle complex software management tasks. The latest release includes many new features and improvements that make this tool even more flexible, efficient, and reliable than ever before.
What's New
Version 2.1: N/A