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