[Nottingham] Gentoo portage tips

[Philip Scott]

Greetings,

> 1)  Avoid emerge later wanting to 'downgrade' a package, previously emerged
> from unstable ie. ~x86.  I probably need a few eg) from DRI HOWTO.

Well, I think the idea is that you only use the unstable keywords for the odd 
few packages you are really intrested in having the 'bleeding edge' of ;) If 
you emerge everything with ~x86, you're just asking for trouble 8*)

> 3. Install XFree-DRM and configure direct rendering
No idea about this, I'm afraid :)

> A weakness of portage was that packages installed to fulfill dependancies,
> might not get updated after security alerts, unless you specifically have
> emerged them.

I don't quite understand you here.. Is there any package system whereby 
packages get automatically updated after security updates? As far as I can 
tell, the system doesn't differentiate between packages specifically emerged 
and packages installed as dependancies. And if you're really worried, emerge 
--update should upgrade all of your installed packages to the latest (and 
theoretically) more secure versions.. And if you can't be bothered with that, 
just re-emerge any package found to be at risk to grab a patched version. 
It'd be silly to have to update *every* dependncy of a package if only an 
update of that package is required.. You'd end up recompiling libc every time 
a securty hole was found in sendmail ;)

Kind Regards,
	Philip