I noticed the Gentoo team made some neat changes to portage and baselayout:
First off they changed the format of the network configuration file, so if you recently sync’d and emerge’d world and are wondering why your networking failed to start this could be why..:
$ cat /etc/conf.d/net
ifconfig_eth0=(
"10.19.66.5 broadcast 10.19.66.255 netmask 255.255.255.0"
)
routes_eth0=(
"default gw 10.19.66.1"
)
Seems sorta wierd, I dont know why they wouldn’t just use C-style blocks or something, oh well.
They also added improved support of USE flags, portage will now display if a package use flags have changed (see screenshot below), and added a command to re-emerge all packages that implement USE flags have changed since you emerged it. This (as well as all the other new portage features) is/are explained at http://www.gentoo.org/news/20041021-portage51.xml.
![[Gentoo Screenshot]](/images/screenshots/gentoo-flagchange.png)
2 Comments
What a stupid thing to include in an update…
Not a very well thought out process on the developers side
What would be a better way? Someone running Gentoo in a production environment would not just blindly “emerge sync” and “emerge -Du world”, they would first investigate all the updates and install what they needed. Someone would obviously notice a new baselayout and assume it might be worth emerging it seporatly to see if it gives any special directions (which this does). I don’t think this will cause a huge issue for most people, but I do think it should be mentioned on Gentoo’s website, I don’t even see it in any GWN issues.