How to safely install a package from portage

[Beep6581]

Hello

I would like to learn the correct way, via the route of least resistance, of safely installing a package from Portage in Sabayon, in such a way that it would be possible to easily update it (i.e. grab latest git code and recompile) either manually or automatically. Specifically: GIMP (=media-gfx/gimp-9999), GEGL and BABL.

While searching for correct ways of doing this, I found conflicting information, and when I check the documentation edit history to get an idea of how relevant it is today vs advice I get in IRC or find in forums, the documentation seems possibly outdated. Well, it leaves me uncertain at best.

I reported this problem in IRC and was asked to open an issue here.

• https://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?title=En:HOWTO:_The_Complete_Portage_Guide
  This, from 2012, basically says "use portage". No mention of sabayon-devkit, docker or other.
• https://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?title=HOWTO:_Safely_mix_Entropy_and_Portage
  This, also from 2012 but with minor updates and unsafe shell snippets, basically says "use devkit".
• I also read or was told somewhere to use Docker.

It would be great if someone knowledgeable found the time to merge these articles into one, clear, up-to-date article on how to install a program from Portage in Sabayon, assuming the package in Portage is known to work well in Gentoo.

[optiz0r]

This is not a good place for generic questions, or to report issues with general portage/entropy documentation, since this is a specific repository for controlling the configuration of the SCR project. The SCR is a project for taking packages from portage overlays other than the main portage tree, but which might be widely useful to the community, building them automatically, and making available via extra add-on repositories.

gegl and babl are available in the sabayon overlay. Newer versions are available in portage, but have not yet been updated in Sabayon. The proper way to go about this is by filing package bump requests in the Sabayon bugtracker: https://bugs.sabayon.org/enter_bug.cgi (Entropy->Request).

With regards to gimp, Sabayon ships a stable version, and that's not going to change. I'm not convinced that adding a nightly build to the main SCR repositories would be widely useful to the community either. The SCR build server is getting pretty close to capacity with the number of repositories being built, so can't really advocate creating a new special SCR repo just for this on our infrastructure.

Your choices:

• Use sabayon-devkit's sabayon-buildpackages and sabayon-createrepo manully, ad-hoc to build the package into something you can install with equo (https://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?title=En:Sabayon_Devkit)
• Run a copy of the SCR vagrant VM on a machine, pointing at a repo that looks like this one (community-repositories) but which contains a basic build.yaml to build gimp. This is like the first option, but will build and package gimp for you every day.
• Build it with portage directly.

As far as I know the instructions here https://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?title=HOWTO:_Safely_mix_Entropy_and_Portage are still valid for using portage directly. They may not have changed much, but that's because the general process for compiling packages doesn't change much. You should avoid replacing any packages with portage other than the one you care about (gimp) so as not to break ABI compatibility with any dependent packages still installed from entropy.

[Beep6581]

Hey @optiz0r

With regard to the first half of your reply, this issue really isn't a request from me to get GIMP-dev or even 2.10.2 into Sabayon (I want 2.10.2 in Sabayon, and have opened relevant issues upstream in Gentoo, but that's another matter). It's strictly about improving the docs to make it clear what someone in my position should do. One article which explains the pros and cons of building something with portage directly vs sabayon-devkit, and an example start to finish of how that's done, would be the ideal outcome.

With regard to the second part of your reply, thank you for the clarification!