I don't know if anybody else is having this problem, but here's what's been annoying me for a while: my emerge -p world is getting stupidly long. 15:54:35 root@legion:/home/mag $ emerge -pU world | wc -l 190 That is totally unwieldy! And why? Because I simply don't care about most updates. If it aint broke, don't fix it. So usually I only upgrade packages that I use on daily basis, and things that affect security. So I have two suggestions to alleviate this problem. First of all, changelogs for ebuilds should be a little more useful than "version bump". How about including some details from the upstream changelog to indicate what has changed in the new version? Like is it a major feature enhancement, or just a minor bugfix release? What are the biggest things that changed? That way its much easier for people to decide if it's worthwhile upgrading. Second, it would be cool if ebuild versions were prioritized. Say 1 to 5. Where 1 is a minor installation issue where people should not need to upgrade if they already to installed the package successfully, and 5 is a new major version of the package or a significant security fix. Then you specify a cutoff priority when doing emerge world, and quickly see what *major* things need upgrading. Alternatively, at least an option to ignore same-package-version-different-ebuild-version (-rX) releases in emerge world would be helpful. Or better yet an easy (aka not editing the world file!!) to exclude any particular version from the list until a new one comes out. Anyway, I am sure you guys will have more ideas on how this can be fixed. I am just pointing out the problem.
Oh and automatic line wrapping for bugzilla would be nice too :)
line wrapping does work in bugzilla, it's handled by css now ... that is, it gets wrapped to your current browser width, not to some predetermined value as for your bug report ... i dont believe in merging upstream ChangeLogs with our ChangeLog's ... maybe including a link to them, but the purpose of our ChangeLog is for tracking the ebuild, not necessarily the package we've already started a 'security' update feature of portage in terms of prioritization ... it may not be the same level for everyone ...
Yeah, ok line wrapping works. There just seems to be a bug that makes it not wrap first time you view the description after submitting and clicking return to bug #blah. Ok so maybe the ebuild changelog is not the best place to put it.... So lets start a separate changelog for the package itself, that's integrated with emerge (aka accessible with emerge -L or something) and shows you changes since the version that you have installed. I agree that different people care about different packages, so priorities might now work too well.... How about iterative world upgrade option then? An option to take a snapshot of current upgrade suggestions and another option to only shows you new packages on top of last snapshot? Sort of like dmesg vs dmesg -c.
If you hit 190, then your world file is excessively large and probably contains packages that should not be in it... I'd imagine you are one of the excessive numbers of people that used qpkg to fill command line arguments to portage at one time, and thus have broken proper tracking for depends using portage. emerge -u world will only do things you have merged from teh command line, and not anything beyond 1st level deps. I suggest you check your world file and trim it down. You want a better interface it sounds like. The logic isn't there to do what your asking, nor is the interface. This definately isn't a priority at the moment.
*** Bug 73128 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 87137 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This was discussed and decided on on the portage-dev ml: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.portage.devel/2054/focus=2054 Short summary: Leave it to alternative tools.
