Eix goodness

Posted on 30 Apr 09 at 22:00 | Tagged as ,

If you’re not using eix, you probably are not (or shouldn’t be) using Gentoo. It’s simply so powerful and fast, that I can’t imagine working on Linux without it. For those not following Planet Larry, I’d like to point out the tip posted by Matija Šuklje about eix-sync. Use it!

12 comments

  1. bill on 30 Apr 09 at 22:20:

    Wow.

    I haven’t used eix since 2005 because I didn’t feel I had a need to, but eix-update is really really nice! Now I no longer need to watch the gentoo-portage rss feed

    Thanks for posting this!

  2. Matija "hook" Šuklje on 1 May 09 at 00:07:

    Actually if you use Paludis (instead of Portage) for some things Eix becomes obsolete, but in other cases Paludis just doesn’t cope (yet?) with the power of Eix, UFED, and Gentoolkit.

    But, yes, since I switched back to Portage, I’m (re)disovering the power of Eix that I didn’t even know existed before :]

    P.S. Wow, my post promoted on Planet Gentoo! I feel honoured!

  3. Chris on 1 May 09 at 00:31:

    I haven’t had a gentoo box without eix for years.

  4. Andrey Kislyuk on 1 May 09 at 04:40:

    Ben, I don’t need you telling me that I shouldn’t be using Gentoo because I don’t use eix.

    For the sake of PR, please be more diplomatic in your wording.

  5. Ben on 1 May 09 at 07:56:

    Gentoo is targeted at power users, and eix is exactly the kind of tool used by power users to ease maintenance and management of their Gentoo system(s). If you’re not using eix, you’re depriving yourself of an excellent, helpful tool. Then the logical question would be: why would you use Gentoo, but not the available power tools?

    So, for the sake of education, I phrased this a bit harshly. It is my, admittedly not so humble, opinion. You’re entitled to yours. ;-)

  6. Dlaor on 1 May 09 at 18:27:

    So educate me then Ben.

    I’m using gentoo for half a year now and I don’t use any overlays.

    Now I just look at gentoo-portage briefly each day. If there is an update to a package that I’m interested in I will usually go to it’s website anyway to see what has been changed: gentoo-portage is good for this since it has the links to these websites. How would eix be more helpful here?

    Seriously, in these six months of gentoo equery has always served me well. Right now I don’t see any reason to use eix, other than it being faster.

    So: What do you use eix for? Why should I start using it?

  7. Michael Croes on 1 May 09 at 23:59:

    I guess what Ben is trying to say is that you should refrain from using EIX, and while you’re at it, also stop using Gentoo.

  8. Ramiro on 2 May 09 at 06:26:

    Thanks very much for your entry. I’ve been using eix for more than a year now and can’t “gentoo” without it :D, but I didn’t know the “*” tip ;)

    I’d like to comment about update-eix-remote, hoping anyone has an answer.
    a) If it is run *before* eix-sync, I lose the possibility of searching in non-installed overlays, but only in the installed ones.
    b) If, on the other hand, update-eix-remote is run *after* eix-sync, the info regarding installed overlays is lost. In this latter case an “eix -I [package]” returns “No matches found” although [package] is installed from an overlay.

    Does anybody know how to solve it?

    Ramiro.

  9. Matija "hook" Šuklje on 2 May 09 at 20:45:

    @Ramiro:

    With joint forces (vekin on #gentoo@irc.freenode.net actually helped) I got the bugger. It’s actually not a bug but a sloppily configured install (on my part at least).
    You have to locate your Layman’s make.conf and include that path into /etc/make.conf. In my case I had to put:
    source /usr/portage/local/layman/make.conf
    After that it worked like a charm :]
    It seems that by default it reads only the /etc/make.conf and if you have overlays handled by Layman it doesn’t look into those settings. So by adding that line you tell it to take into consideration Layman’s settings as well.
    I hope this solves your problem as well.

  10. coolsnowmen on 5 May 09 at 19:51:

    For people who are wondering what you gain with EIX-
    eix helps resolving what versions of a package exist and what their keyword/masking/use/slot state are. If you never mix stable/testing packages, never use overlays then it is not really necessary. When you are trying to figure out what versions of amarok are out there, then it is handy and efficient.
    IMHO

  11. Dlaor on 5 May 09 at 21:14:

    Thanks for the info coolsnowmen. I’ll remember that, someday eix might be useful to me as well.

  12. mv on 6 May 09 at 10:16:

    @RAMIRO: I suggest you ask such questions in the gentoo forum.
    To “resolve” (a) you can also use KEEP_VIRTUAL=true in /etc/eixrc.
    What you observe in (b) is a feature of update-eix-remote, see the comments in the help page concerning OVERLAYPARENT.

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