Welcome to rtkmerge

rtkmerge is a GUI to the emerge command to handle packages under the Gentoo Linux Distrubution. It was initially written to help when running 'emerge world' to update the entire system. I found that I sometimes didn't want to spend time on updating all the packages. Preventing this would require to merge all programs one by one or fiddle with blocks. With rtkmerge you get all the outdated packages presented in a list and you can easily select which packages you want and don't want. rtkmerge will then merge every package separately which also gives you the opportunity to set different USE-flags for different programs. This is useful for example if you want to install vim with X-support but emacs without X-support.

Even though the program is aimed at 'merging world' it can also be run to merge other packages. Any argument to rtkmerge is sent to emerge when creating the list of packages. Note that these options are not used when emerge is called the second time to actually merge. A reasonable usage of rtkmerge might be `rtkmerge world -u --deep` or `rtkmerge ruby`. The options -p and -v are always set.

rtkmerge doesn't handle dependencies itself, so you should always press the pretend-button to find out which packages will really be installed. A package that you have unchecked might still be installed if it is a dependency of some package that is checked. Hack the code if you want to change this.

News

2005-01-21: Long time no seen. I've been away from gentoo for a while and tried GoboLinux, lived in Germany and started my studies at the university. When I got back I realised that rtkmerge was broken with the current portage. So here is a updated version (0.6.1) to fix it. The popup menu seems to be broken aswell though :( but that doesn't really prevent you from running rtkmerge. And also, since wuite some time back the most correct adress here is rtkmerge.webhop.net which is used since it's a bit more flexible than a dynamic dns. Please use it if you link here or to the scripts.

2003-09-04: Version 0.6 released. Finally there is a scrollbar in the main window. I'm still not quite satisfied with how it looks but I feel that it is better to release it now because it's an important feature. For those of you who has written to me, thanks for the encouragement. Important in this release is that we have a new programmer: Zack Smith (hoeken). He has contributed with some code and ideas. If you want to contribute with either code or just vague ideas please feel welcome. Infact I'm all out of ideas myself. I almost thought about naming the new version 1.0 because it fulfills most of my project goals. It's basicllay all up to you people now.

2003-08-07: Version 0.5 has been released. Among other changes a progressbar for the individual package has been added. In fact it existed in the previous version as well but it was turned off by default. This one is rewritten and works so good that it has been turned on by default. 'So good' does not mean you can trust it, but it means it doesn't break anything. Right now I use a method which simply approximates the compile time to be as much as the last time you compiled that program. This is done with help of a script called 'splat', which you'll have to merge. Screenshot at bottom of the page

2003-08-06: I have registered a dyndns for this computer. The url here is now froeding.dyndns.org/rtkmerge/. So now I won't have to have nightmare about changing ip all the time.

2003-08-02: I've got some positive response about rtkmerge. Pythonhead wrote an ebuild. It's not in portage yet but you can get it from bugs.

Installation

rtkmerge requires Ruby 1.8.0 or newer to work well. Ruby must be installed with the USE-flag +tcltk.

download (old releases)
switch to root-user: su
set permissions: chown root rtkmerge && chgrp root rtkmerge && chmod 755 rtkmerge
move: mv rtkmerge /usr/bin

Screenshots

Scrollbar!

Failed packages are easily detected, since 0.5

right-clicking on the package

Links - similar projects

Portal
PortageMaster
kportage
gportage
porthole

Contact

Contact me by mail or on irc (freenode.net) if you have any questions, complains, bug-reports. My email address is n04df [at] student [dot] lth [dot] se, my irc nick is 'upiom'. I wouldn't mind if you wrote back just to say you used the program.

Thanks

#tcl and #ruby-lang @freenode
Pythonhead