Gentoolkit

Gentoolkit is a suite of tools to ease the administration of a Gentoo system. This document covers the basics of some of the tools present in Gentoolkit.

What is Gentoolkit?
Gentoo is a unique distribution and presents some complexities that simply do not exist for other distributions. As Gentoo developers and contributors discovered some of these complexities, they also wrote tools to help users and administrators work around them. Many tools have been contributed to the Gentoo project and are included in the package.

Gentoolkit contains a whole bunch of useful tools to help users manage packages and keep track of what is going on in their systems. Most users - particularly those who update systems often - will benefit from having Gentoolkit installed.

Emerge
As with most other Gentoo packages, installation is as simple as an emerge:

Finding documentation
Any documentation that a program might have (other than man pages) is stored in.

euse
euse is a tool to see, set and unset USE flags at various places. For more information on USE flags, please refer to the USE Flags. See euse -h for complete help and all options.

Viewing, setting, and unsetting USE flags
The euse -a command reads the current active USE flags and displays them.

Similarly the euse -a -g command is used to view active global USE flags. The euse -a -l command does the same for active local USE flags. and  are sub-options to euse and need an option before them (like  ) to function correctly.

euse is able to set or unset USE flags. The commands used for this are euse -E flagname</tt> (enable a flag) and euse -D flagname</tt> (disable a flag).

Enabling a USE flag:

The file looks like so after the command was ran:

Disabling a USE flag:

Again, the file after the command:

revdep-rebuild
This tool is Gentoo's Reverse Dependency rebuilder. It will scan the installed ebuilds to find packages that have become broken as a result of an upgrade of a package they depend on. It can emerge those packages for users automatically but it can also happen that a given package does not work with the currently installed dependencies, in which case you should upgrade the broken package to a more recent version. revdep-rebuild</tt> will pass flags to emerge</tt> which lets you use the  flag to see what is going to be emerged again before going any further.

To rebuild some packages run revdep-rebuild</tt> without the  flag and the listed packages will be emerged again.

glsa-check
glsa-check</tt> is mainly a test tool that keeps track of the various GLSA's (Gentoo Linux Security Advisory) and will eventually be integrated into emerge</tt> and equery</tt>.

eread
eread</tt> is a simple utility to display elog files produced by >=. The saving of elog files can be enabled by setting a couple of variables in :

Once elog has been set up to satisfaction, run eread</tt> to view the log files.

Select a number and the file will be displayed using the paging program specified in the PAGER environment variable. If PAGER is not set, it will use less</tt>. The PAGER environmental variable can be set using eselect</tt> (module ).

After displaying the elog item, you will be prompted if you want to delete the file.

eclean
eclean</tt> is a tool to remove old source files and old binary packages from the system.

When building and installing packages, the source files are downloaded and preserved in, usually. This can accumulate several gigabytes of material over time if it is not cleaned periodically. Users should run eclean-dist</tt> to clean source files from.

It is possible to create archives of installed packages by using quickpg</tt> or FEATURES="buildpkg". These archived packages are kept in PKGDIR, usually. When they are no longer needed, or if they are too old, eclean-pkg</tt> can be ran to remove them from. It is a good way to ensure that any binary packages on the system are only the latest versions.

For more information on <tt>eclean</tt> and tips on maintaining a cruft-free system, please read man eclean or check the eclean article.