Bug 125005 – 'emerge --sync -NDuav world' doesn't both sync and update world.

• Product: Portage Development
• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

[Description Philip H. Smith 2006-03-04 12:19:03 UTC]

This is an old, old annoyance of mine for a long time, that I'm finally submitting.

Given that it seems like synching and updating everything is a common (if not the most common) use case for emerge, it would be nice to simply be able to do one after the other in one command.

What the command above does is sync, and then ignore the rest of the arguments.  Swapping them (so, 'emerge -NDuav world --sync'), yields an error 'multiple actions requested.. please choose only only' and tells me I should pick one of world or sync.

The fix could probably be as large or as small as those interested want to make it.  The cadillac might be 'multi action support' that breaks the arguments along 'action' request boundaries, lumps options with them in some scheme, and runs all actions in order. (For non-action options, I could see either collecting all 'non-action' options first & apply them globally, or lumping them with the first action that appears after them.)  This would fulfill my request & still preserve the existing notions of what is an action and what isn't, without attaching more magic to them than that.

I don't particularly want the cadillac;  I'd rather that the one option that does synching just becomes more magical, and treated specially.  Which is to say, I'd like to see it become an option that can be set for the update and install actions.

[Comment 1 Alec Warner (RETIRED) 2006-03-04 12:26:02 UTC]

alias update-world emerge --sync && emerge -uDNav world ?

I don't see why we should spend time adding this to emerge when you can build the command yourself anyway.

[Comment 2 Alec Warner (RETIRED) 2006-03-04 12:39:13 UTC]

(In reply to comment #1)
> alias update-world emerge --sync && emerge -uDNav world ?
> 
> I don't see why we should spend time adding this to emerge when you can build
> the command yourself anyway.
> 

To put it better, The argument processing is not the simplest, you need to detect "sync" and whether it's the only option specified, if it's not the only option you need to make sure it runs first, then you need to re-exec emerge with the other specified action....It's difficult to do in the manner, and easier to do the way I suggested above.