Gentoo – autounmask

This script has been around since last year and is definitely worth talking about again. I mentioned it on the Sabayon Forum when it first came out to help people with unmasking, but it must of went over their heads as not many comments were not made about it. Since it’s release it has made it’s way into the official portage tree now. It’s fairly simple to use, don’t believe me, take a look at the help file.

root@wolf911:/home/wolfden # autounmask –h autounmask version 0.21 (using PortageXS-0.02.07 and portage-2.1.4.4) Usage: autounmask category/package-version Options: -h, –help : Show this help. -p, –pretend : Just pretend. -n, –noversions : Do not append version when unmasking a package.

It only has 3 switches to remember. Even I can remember those. So lets take an example of using the latest gnome. Gnome contains a lot of packages to unmask and well it would be impossible to guess all the packages. So we fire up autounmask and tell it to do it for us.

# autounmask gnome-base/gnome-2.20.0

It will now do it’s thing and edit the files for you. Once it gets done, all you need to do is:

# emerge -pv =gnome-base/gnome-2.22.0

I like to run versionless, which is really nice with all the new KDE 4 releases. I didn’t need to unmask 4.0.0, 4.0.1 and now 4.0.2. As they roll out, my world update grabs the packages.

# autounmask -n =kde-base/kde-meta-4.0.2

This works for any masked package in portage, single or multiple packages.