I am a big fan of abstracting everything, and having computers do as much as possible for me. Steve Long has been working with bash and emerge and has come up with a little program called igli-update.
This script is a bash wrapper for emerge that aims to make it more convenient to keep your Gentoo Linux system up to date, and is especially useful at helping you survive long emerges as it will keep retrying failed packages until there are none left that will compile. It will then create a list of failed packages at the end. It also attempts to consider GCC upgrades as well as filtering emerge output to only show the more useful information.
There are some configuration options at the top of the script. You can specify the log file names and locations, if you do not like the default. Also, if you want a package to not be installed or not to be rebuilt then you would add it to the nc= or nr= arrays respectively.
The script is still under development, at time of writing, the latest version is available via this Gentoo Forum post.
<p>Steve let me know that he keeps an anthology of his favourite Gentoo tips,
well worth a read here: <a class="reference external" href="http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-529919.html">http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-529919.html</a></p>
<p>Thanks for the interest in the script. Nice blog btw.
Latest version is at <a class="reference external" href="http://phpfi.com/213711">http://phpfi.com/213711</a></p>
<p>An example of the output for a compile of kdelibs is at:
<a class="reference external" href="http://phpfi.com/213641">http://phpfi.com/213641</a></p>
<p>That shows the best bit (for me)- you lose all the compiler cruft.</p>
<p>Cheers Steve, I have updated it accordingly! Keep up the good work!</p>
<p><a class="reference external" href="http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-546828.html">http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-546828.html</a></p>
<p>BTW Thanks for the interview with the security dev. Great read, and well
timed <img src="/static/forum/img/smilies/smile.png"></p>