[Nottingham] Gentoo portage tips

[Ben Blackburne]

While we are on the subject of Gentoo, here are two more tips that I
learned recently, and were not immediately obvious from reading man
pages (or at least were not to me!)

"revdep-rebuild" will attempt to find any packages that have problems
due to a change in library version. I spent a long time messing with
this after upgrading to the breakmygentoo.net gnome 2.4 beta packages,
as 2 gnome libraries (liblinc and bonobo-activation) are depreciated.
Once were are removed, I had to use revdep-rebuild to find the broken
packages and rebuild them. In theory this works. Of course "in theory
communism works. In theory". In practice I spent ages reading the output
and doing manual emerges. Oh well, I was using packages from a site
called "break my gentoo".

"g-cpan.pl" will take any cpan package you specify and install it with
gentoo portage. Unlike revdep-rebuild this is a lovely simple utility
that seems to work well!

Ben