FAQ: Things Paludis Does Differently

• No FEATURES Equivalent
• No Automatic Directory Creation
• Revdep-rebuild Equivalent
• Alternatives to Layman
• No package.provided file

No FEATURES Equivalent

Paludis doesn't use the FEATURES variable. We find this to be a rather ugly way of handling things. We do have equivalents to most values:

ccache

See Use ccache.

collision-protect

There are various third party hooks that implement this. We might start shipping one as a demo hook at some point. Note that collision-protect is conceptually broken and you shouldn't be using it.

distcc

See Use distcc.

keepwork, keeptemp, noclean

You can use BUILD_OPTIONS: work=preserve for a similar effect.

nodoc, noinfo, noman

You could write a hook that removes the relevant directories from $D.

nostrip

Set symbols=preserve in the BUILD_OPTIONS group in use.conf, for the packages you want it to apply to.

sandbox

Always on.

splitdebug

Set the flags symbols=split in the BUILD_OPTIONS group in use.conf, for the packages you want it to apply to.

test

Controlled by BUILD_OPTIONS: optional_tests in use.conf.

No Automatic Directory Creation

Portage usually automatically creates directories for things. Paludis will usually refuse to create directories, except as a subdirectory of an existing Paludis-owned directory. This is for security reasons -- Paludis does not know what permissions are correct for you for the directory, and unlike Portage it does not grant back-door root access to all users in a particular group.

As of Paludis 0.46.0, when Paludis does create cache subdirectories, it will copy the mode of the main cache directory rather than going by your umask.

Incidentally, if you want to let multiple users do Paludis cache writes and the like, you should look into what chmod +s does to directories. Note, however, that malicious users who can write cache files can probably gain local root access.

Revdep-rebuild Equivalent

Use cave fix-linkage.

Alternatives to Layman

Portage does not natively support multiple repositories, so the layman tool is used to hack around this. Since Paludis does support multiple repositories, there is no need for a fancy tool to manage and sync overlays.

Adding a repository to Paludis simply requires an appropriate configuration file to be created, and then a normal sync to be carried out. It is possible to create repository configuration files by hand; however, an automated method is available which simplifies things considerably. To enable the automated method, simply ensure that the unavailable and repository repositories have been configured, and then a repository can automatically by configured simply by installing repository/somerepo.

Note that previously, a script named playman was used for this purpose; the automatic method is now considered preferable.

No package.provided file

Portage supports pretending that a package is installed for the purposes of dependency resolution via a file called package.provided. Paludis provides a cleaner approach, in the form of cave import. cave import allows you to more cleanly reinstall, uninstall, and upgrade unpackaged packages, using the same sort of merge/unmerge process that paludis uses for ebuilds.

To use cave import, you will first have to configure an installed_unpackaged format repository.

To get a more direct equivalent of package.provided, you can "install" an empty directory with cave import.