jw.emerge_update 0.4.9

Package maintenance (portage) and system management for Gentoo Linux

This is a script for package update and general system management in Gentoo’s portage package manager. The aim is to automate system updating and maintenance as straight forward as possible. There are a lot of commands to be run to keep a Gentoo Linux system healthy and tidy. Emerge alone does not do a lot. That’s where this script comes in.

What does emerge_update do?

The following tasks are run:

1. Run qcheck --badonly --all to check for altered files belonging to packages installed with emerge. With a few exceptions no files should be modified. This is a simple way to detect malicious activities e.g. by an intruder.[1]

2. Run eix-sync -q to update the package repository

3. Backup /etc (see Backups)

4. Run emerge @world. A lot of options are given, see Emerge Options

5. If emerge returns with a non-zero status, the assumption is made that some packages required some changes in the files in /etc/portage. In this case, etc-update --automode=-5 /etc/portage is run to make the changes proposed by emerge permanent. Then, emerge @world is run again. Of course, if emerge fails because of some non-trivial problem this needlessly re-runs emerge a second time without effect.

6. Run emerge --depclean to remove unnecessary packages

7. Run revdep-rebuild --ignore to rebuild packages with broken shared library dependencies due to the last emerge.

8. Run emerge @preserved-rebuild. Another measure to repair broken library dependencies. Gentoo recommends running both revdep-rebuild and @preserved-rebuild.

9. Run python-updater

10. Run perl-cleaner --all

11. Run cfg-update --update --automatic-only to update all config files which can be updated automatically.

12. Run cfg-update --index to create update indexes for the next run of cfg-update.

13. Run prelink --all to prelink all binaries to speed up loading them.

14. Backup /var/db/pkg (see Backups). If this directory is destroyed, you are in the most serious trouble.

15. Run qcheck --all --update to bring the checksums up-to-date for the next run.

16. Run emaint -c all to check for potential problems or points for improvement. This does not repair anything. You can run emaint -f ... eg. emaint -f all to fix things.

Using emerge_update

Options

-h, --help

show the help

--dry-run, -n

don’t execute commands, just print them

--verbose, -v

print commands as they are executed

--version, -V

show program’s version number and exit

--output OUTPUT, -o OUTPUT

specify output file

--append, -a

append to output file instead of overwriting

To test the script, run it with emerge_update --dry-run. This way, it only shows what would be done.

Tip

Run the script with --verbose --output /var/log/emerge_update --append to have a nice log of what’s going on.

Tip

Run the script with nice -19 and ionice -c3 in order to not put the system under too much load.

Backups

Backups are done by renaming and hard-linking the target ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.listif possible. This does not work with mount points, however. Directories acting as a mount point are backed up as a tar file into a backup directory ( /var/lib/emerge_update by default). The backup directory is created if necessary.

Note

You should maintain the backup directory (usually /var/lib/emerge_update) by deleting old backups. You can do this with package tmpwatch. The move-and-link backups retain 8 generations.

Emerge Options

Emerge is run with these options:

--nospinner

This is not desirable in automated runs of emerge

--update

Only update packages

--newuse

Update packages when the USE configuration changes

--deep

Consider updating dependencies

--keep-going

Continue in case of error to update as much as possible

--autounmask y

Unmask required packages

--autounmask-write y

Make unmasking permanent

--jobs n

where n = 4. This runs a maximum of 4 parallel emerge jobs

--load-average n

where n is the number of processors on-line in the system or 3 if this number cannot be determined.

This prevents creating new emerge jobs if the load average if above n