It might be nice to have a feature that would allow for the building of a portage-style tbz2 package based on what's already installed on the filesystem Something like this, for example: awk '/^obj / { print $2}' /var/db/pkg/net-www/lynx-2.8.4.1c/CONTENTS | xargs tar cvjf /usr/src/lynx-2.8.4.1c.tar.bz2 Should make a tarball of the files that make up the currently installed lynx. I'm sure, however, that the tbz2 packages that portage uses contain other information (dependency information, etc). Indeed, I tried using the resulting package and it didn't seem to work. This would be quite useful. If you're wondering, here are my main reasons: For safe and fast rollback in case of disaster, and for a very quick method of building a bunch of packages from an already installed system. While it's smart to use --buildpkg when emerging, I (and i'm sure others) don't always remember to do it, or started using it only recently. So before emerging something like a new version of glibc, it would be useful to be able to take a snapshot of the currently installed glibc and pack it up into a portage-style tbz2. If the system was unbootable after installing the new glibc, it seems to me that it would be as simple as booting to the LiveCD, merging in the tbz2 that was just made, and cleaning out the faulty version of glibc with emerge -C. (Note I do NOT mean compile the currently installed version from source and package it into a tbz2 file, which can be done by re-emerging a program with the --usepkg flag or by using 'ebuild <ebuildfile> package'. I mean take a snapshot of the program from the already compiled files as they exist on the filesystem. I'm not aware of a straightforward way to do this, but if there is i'd be interested in hearing about it. Otherwise it'd be a nice enhancement :-)
/usr/lib/portage/bin/quickpkg
