Suggestions for http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=2&chap=2 * mention somewhere: There are some gui interfaces to emerge/portage, such as ... . * how do I do a listing of all the packages that already were installed? * describe what kinds of outputs can come with mask. you do a good job with stable vs. unstable, and hard-masked vs. not-hard-masked. however, I have gotten such messages as masked by missing keyword masked by: *- and probably a couple of other ones who I cannot remember right now. could we explain at least these two, also? regards, /iaw
there arent any official GUI portage interfaces and i wouldnt recommend any ... we've had too many in the past die with development
There is no official GUI, yet. I'll pass this one on to swift as he's busy integrating the portage-manual doc into the handbook.
I'm not going to put any information on porthole or other efforts that provide a front-end for portage as none of these projects have reached a sufficient maturity. You cannot easily show what packages are already installed. The closest method is to run "emerge -ep world" but even that will miss the orphaned dependencies that are still laying around. It is however sufficient if "emerge -p depclean" provides no packages to be unmerged. Otherwise you will have to sum both lists. I will update the Gentoo Handbook to provide more input about the masked stuff, but I will make sure that readers will understand that this masking should not be taken lightly - if a package is masked it is due to a reason, not to make Gentoo user's life hard.
qpkg -I should list all installed packages. I'll mention it in the gentoolkit.xml that is about to came back to life. HB could have link to it as it already mentions the tool but not the doc.
sven: IMHO, the docs should mention generically that, as of august 2004, a number of GUI frontends are being written, but that they do not yet seem too mature. see, negative information is useful, too---otherwise, endusers like me will think that it exists and they will spend time searching. xavier: thanks for the qpkg hint. should or could "emerge -q" invoke "qpkg -I"? (not important, just a question.) thanks, guys. regards, /ivo
I'd rather not mention that there are unsupported, non-stable tools out there. Think about the "Gentoo doesn't have a graphical installer", does that mean we should point users to the VidaLinux distribution? We can't offer any support on it.
I've added information about all possible masking reasons.
