1 News (mainly features/major bug fixes)
6 * Add link level dependency awareness to emerge --depclean and --prune actions
7 in order to protect against uninstallation of required libraries.
8 * Add support for generic package sets (also see RELEASE-NOTES)
9 * Add support for FEATURES=preserve-libs which preserves libraries when the
10 sonames change during upgrade or downgrade, and the @preserved-rebuild
11 package set which rebuilds consumers of preserved libraries.
15 * Improve handling of repositories/overlays for cases in which the same ebuild
16 is provided by multiple repositories but with different masking status, and
17 support for repository constraints on atoms (atom::repo) in configuration
19 * Add emerge --rebuild-if-* options that trigger rebuilds of reverse
20 dependencies when packages are rebuilt or updated. Related --rebuild-exclude
21 and --rebuild-ignore options can be used to avoid rebuilds for specific
23 * Add emerge --reinstall-atoms, --useoldpkg-atoms, and --usepkg-exclude options
24 which can be used to alter selection rules for specific packages.
25 * Add FEATURES=parallel-install and ebuild-locks, allowing for greater
26 parallelization when installing packages (by using finer-grained locks).
31 * Add support for EAPI 4. Refer to the PMS EAPI Cheat Sheet, portage's html
32 docs installed with USE=doc, or `man 5 ebuild` for more info about EAPI 4.
33 Bug #273620 tracks EAPI 4 implementation in portage.
38 * There is a new ipc (inter-process communication) USE flag which is enabled
39 by default. This allows portage to communicate with running ebuild processes,
40 for things like best_version, has_version, and die calls in nested processes.
41 This flag should remain enabled unless it is found to be incompatible with a
42 specific profile or environment. When enabled, it fixes bug #278895,
43 bug #315615, and makes subshell die support more robust (so that repoman's
44 ebuild.nesteddie check is irrelevant).
48 * The top-level __init__.py for the portage python package has been split into
49 many smaller python modules, making the code easier to navigate and allowing
50 small parts of the portage api to be imported with less overhead.
54 * Add support for EAPI 3. This adds support for installation prefix, including
55 new EPREFIX, ED, and EROOT variables which are used by econf and einstall
56 helpers. Also, EAPI 3 adds xz extension support to the unpack helper.
61 * Add license visibility filtering (GLEP 23)
62 * Add --accept-properties option for emerge which allows you to use
63 --accept-properties=-interactive in order to temporarily exclude
65 * Add support for Python 3.0. At least Python 2.6 is now required in order to
66 support the new syntax which is used by Python 3.0.
71 * Add support for a new EAPI="2" value. For more information about new EAPI
72 features, refer to the "Ebuild" chapter of the html documentation that is
73 installed with portage.
74 * Add PORTAGE_IONICE_COMMAND setting for make.conf which is called to adjust
75 IO priority on portage and it's subprocesses.
76 * Add emerge --jobs and --load-average options which specify behavior
77 for building packages in parallel or for generating metadata in parallel
79 * Add emerge --keep-going option to continue as much as possible after
80 an error. When an error occurs, dependencies are recalculated for
81 remaining packages and any with unsatisfied dependencies are
82 automatically dropped. The --skipfirst option automatically drops
83 packages in the same way, and also drops any masked packages.
84 * Add git and subversion support for repoman.
85 * It is now possible to use `emerge <file>` to reinstall the package that
86 installed a particular file. Package contents entries are indexed to
87 improve performance. A command such as `emerge /lib/modules` can serve
88 as a decent substitute for module-rebuild.
89 * Namespace sanitizing: move all portage related code into portage.* namespace,
90 rename portage_foo modules to portage.foo (but keep symlinks for compability)
91 * Add support for news items (GLEP 42)
92 * Add FEATURES=protect-owned which is identical to the collision-protect
93 feature except that files may be overwritten if they are not explicitly
94 listed in the contents of a currently installed package.
99 * For extra careful dependency handling, emerge has a new --complete-graph
100 option that causes it to consider the deep dependencies of all packages from
101 the system and world sets. With this option enabled, emerge will bail out
102 if it determines that the given operation will break any dependencies of
103 the packages that have been added to the graph. Unlike the --deep option,
104 the --complete-graph option does not cause any more packages to be updated
105 than would have otherwise been updated with the option disabled.
106 * Blockers are now resolved automatically in many more cases
107 than before. When it's safe, blocked packages are uninstalled
108 automatically so that users are no longer inconvenienced with the
109 task. Automatically uninstalled packages are displayed in the merge
110 list, marked "uninstall" and highlighted in red. With the --tree
111 option enabled, it's possible to see which package(s) caused other
112 ones to be automatically uninstalled.
113 * The dependency resolver now has a feedback mechanism that helps make atom
114 selections more consistent with previous selections that have been added to
115 the graph. This solves some common cases of bug #1343.
120 * After the initial setup phase, the original ebuild and eclasses are no
121 longer needed because the same ebuild environment is reused for the
122 entire lifecycle of the package, including uninstallation.
123 * The emerge --search action supports searching of both installed and binary packages
124 The --usepkg and --usepkgonly options control which repositories are searched.
129 * Allow per-module setting of PORTAGE_ELOG_CLASSES
130 * Add new elog module "echo" to simply display messages when emerge exits
131 * Add ** as new token for package.keywords to bypass the keyword visibility layer
132 * USE_EXPAND variables such as LINGUAS support a * wildcard that will enable
133 all of the corresponding flags that are listed in IUSE for a given package.
134 USE_EXPAND wildcards such as linguas_* are supported in USE and package.use.
135 * The merge process preserves the modification timestamp of files that it
136 installs. The unmerge process will not uninstall files that are claimed by
137 another package in the same slot.
138 * PDEPEND is now installed as soon as possible so that it behaves more like
139 RDEPEND. This makes PDEPEND more useful for breaking the dependency cycles
140 that are sometimes triggered by RDEPEND and DEPEND.
141 * Enable "echo" and "save_summary" elog modules by default
142 * Fix -* handling in package.keywords to work as intended (reset the accepted
143 keywords list), also see RELEASE-NOTES.
144 * Make elog functionality available to python code
149 * Ebuilds support default USE flags via +flag in IUSE.
150 * New-style virtuals are now usable for packages that depend on themselves for
152 * Profiles support multiple inheritance and package.use.
153 * CONFIG_PROTECT and CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK both support files (not just
155 * Collision protection handles symlinks properly.
156 * Dependencies can be satisfied by installed packages that do not have matching
157 ebuilds in the portage tree or overlay.
158 * Emerge automatically ignores blockers that are made irrelevant by an upgrade.
159 * Emerge supports "reverse blocker detection" which means that the blockers of
160 installed packages will always be respected.
161 * Emerge builds a complete dependency graph in order to ensure correct merge
162 order and detection of circular dependencies.
163 * The world and system sets allow automatic update of all installed slots.
164 * DEPEND atoms support SLOT dependencies of the form ${CATEGORY}/${PN}:${SLOT}.
165 * Development: Extend PYTHONPATH support to allow overriding the hardcoded
166 /usr/lib/portage/pym for development/testing purposes
167 * New "finalize" hook for elog modules enabling modules to perform actions on
168 shutdown (like dispatching collected messages).
169 * New elog modules mail_summary and save_summary that act like the mail/save
170 modules except that they merge messages from multiple packages in a single
172 * New QA loglevel and matching eqawarn function
173 * `ebuild foo test` now always runs src_test if available
174 * If DOC_SYMLINK_DIR is set portage installs symlinks to html documention there
175 * FEATURES="test" automatically implies USE="test".
180 * Profiles support use.force, package.use.force, and package.use.mask files.
182 portage-2.1 (ongoing via pre releases)
185 * FEATURES="confcache" integration; global caching to speed up configure calls,
186 requires dev-util/confcache
187 * elog framework and accompanying modules for logging ebuild warnings, errors
188 and general notices. Collects eerror/ewarn/elog/einfo messages.
189 * New elog function (should replace einfo in many cases)
190 * version syntax enhancements allowing multiple suffixes and a new 'cvs'
191 version prefix for denoting "live sources" ebuilds.
192 * config files as directories enabling more flexible settings management.
193 * Addition of an register_die_hook method that allows ebuild/eclasses to
194 register functions to be called for better debugging on errors.
195 * Addition of pre and post user hookable functions for each ebuild phase, accessible
196 via portage bashrc. Example would be pre_src_unpack .
197 * cache refactoring- runtime improvement from 35% -> 65%.
198 * Intelligently handle and display USE_EXPAND-based IUSE variables.
199 * FEATURES="parallel-fetch". Download in parallel to compilation.
200 * Include a "changed or new" USE flag output when --verbose isn't specified.
201 * Support for splitting out debug information into separate files in
203 * exec subsystem refactoring (now with less bugs!)
204 * Added sha256 and rmd160 hashes for digests/manifests
205 * Make --emptytree only apply to ${ROOT} rather than always including /.
206 * Allow packages to be upgraded that are only depended on via a
207 "|| ( =cat/pkg-1* =cat/pkg-2* )" construct.
208 * Ebuild output is no longer cut off early when using PORT_LOGDIR.
209 * Distfiles indirection- $DISTFILES access goes through a tmp dir to fail
210 access to files not listed in SRC_URI.
211 * Emerge now uses --resume to restart itself after portage upgrade.
212 * Atomic file updates via the new atomic_ofstream class.
213 * Global updates and fixpackages performance optimizations.
214 * Tests show that file locking is now more reliable.
215 * A bash call stack is printed when an ebuild dies in ebuild.sh.
216 * New rsync option handling by using a generic PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS variable
217 * Manifest2 support that will allow digest-* files to be eliminated from the tree.