Pkgcore

is an alternative package manager for Gentoo, similar to Portage. It aims for high performance, good extensibility and a clean design. It also subsumes most of the functionality of and.

Updating the system
For synchronizing the local copies of the Portage tree and any overlays the utility is used. Then is invoked to update all packages and clean superfluous packages.

Searching and installing a package
To search for a package use the pquery program:

For example to find some audio software for encoding files one may use the following to find.

Then install the new package with :

In our example this would be the following:

Configuration
If there is no specific pkgcore configuration (that is or ) it reads the Portage configuration and converts it transparently for use. For a detailed explanation of how the pkgcore specific configuration works see Pkgcore/Configuration.