On Sunday 01 January 2006 21:18, William Gabriel wrote: > I want to start this post off by stressing that I am not complaining, > but merely inquiring.
There is nothing to complain about in what happened to you, it's just the expected behaviour if your system is x86 (read on for the details). > I got comfortable with Ruby, and I now want to install Rails. I > started with the typical 'emerge --sync' and found that the most > recent version of Rails in Portage is 0.13.1. A lot of work has gone > into Rails to get it to version 1.0.0, and that is the version I would > like to install. Naturally, I would also like Portage to manage the > installation over manually installing it. Yes, it's very simple. Create the file /etc/portage/package.keywords (if it doesn't exist already) and put the following lines in it: dev-ruby/rails ~x86 dev-ruby/activerecord ~x86 dev-ruby/activesupport ~x86 dev-ruby/actionmailer ~x86 dev-ruby/actionpack ~x86 dev-ruby/actionwebservice ~x86 Then try to reemerge rails and it shuld bring in version 1.0.0 (depending on your setup, it might be necessary to add a few other packages in /etc/portage/package.keywords). > My main question has to do with about how Portage gets updated. Is > there some central authority that updates the repository, or is it any > user that is interested in making a Portage package? How often does > software get updated (it seems like Ruby was pretty close to > up-to-date, but Rails was a little behind). > > Is there any way that I can help update the package? Is there > documentation for updating packages? And where would I find the > 0.13.1 package source so that I have a base to work with? And then > how wou submit the new package to the central repository? I suggest you read the handbook, part 2 and 3 to get the basics of how portage works, and in particular this: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=3&chap=3 to learn about the different software branches gentoo provides (ie, "x86" and "~x86" for the x86 architecture, "sparc" and "~sparc" for the sparc, etc.). In short, the software you need *is* in portage, but is marked "unstable" (~x86). "Unstable" here does not necessarily mean that it doesn't work (in that case it would be marked -* or not keyworded at all for your arch), but simply that it has not received a sufficient amount of testing to be considered "stable". Packages marked ~x86 usually work just fine. Some people even run their whole system in ~x86, by changing the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS variable in /etc/make.conf. HTH -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
