Safely Stopping Emerge

junkmonkey · n00b Joined: 28 Oct 2006 Posts: 6

Hi,

Is there a way that I don't know about to instruct 'emerge' to stop after completing merging the current package? I was thinking something like kill -s USR1. Or perhaps there's a better way.

Right now I'm doing a large emerge --newuse world, which is going to take a few hours. Halfway through building glibc I realise that I want to change a few use flags, which I know don't affect the package that's currently being built. So I change the use flags, then sit here twiddling my thumbs for the next hour or so waiting for glibc to finish emerging so I can hit Ctrl-C and start emerge --newuse world again to work with the updated flags.

Surely I'm not the only one who has done that? I'd like to tell emerge to just stop after it has merged the current package so I don't need to sit here staring at the screen waiting for my Ctrl-C moment to come up. Yes, of course I could just interrupt that package or even the next one... but I don't really want to do that.

hielvc · Posted: Sat Oct 28, 2006 3:14 pm Post subject:

Its not elegent but "CNTRL C" will stop emerge. If your doing -uDN update, particularly if your going to change your USE flags, then just re-run your original command. Anything that is not affected by the change in USE flags and or has already been update wont be rebuilt.

If this was in the middile of an --emptytree system/world then to restart where you were "emerge --resume".

The one other cavate is when you stop emerge or it fails while biulding something it leaves crud behind in the /var/tmp/portage directory. So you should periodicaly "rm -r /var/tmp/portage/* " to clean it out.
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Dlareh · Advocate Joined: 06 Aug 2005 Posts: 2102

He specifically said CTRL+C is not what he's looking for. He wants the currently building package to finish merging, and THEN for emerge to stop.
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hielvc · Posted: Sat Oct 28, 2006 3:46 pm Post subject:

I was never smart enough to figure out how to do that :lol:

Did you

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junkmonkey · n00b Joined: 28 Oct 2006 Posts: 6

Thanks Dlareh, you saved me a post.

I guess I could write a script that watches emerge.log for 'completed emerge' and then kills emerge - it would probably work as well as me watching and stopping it by hand. It's just not a very clean solution! Also wouldn't work with more than one emerge at once, and will presumably interrupt the next package just as it's starting. No worse than me hitting Ctrl-C but not a lot better.

I'll give it a go though.

hielvc · Posted: Sat Oct 28, 2006 5:41 pm Post subject:

1. CNTRL C 2 keystrokes :wink:

2. parrellal emerges, unless your just fetching files, is guaranteed to bork. Portage is still subject to circulaur dependencies and out of step emerges, pkg1 fails because it needs pkg2. You restart emerge it installs pkg2 and then some time latter pkg1. Granted there have been major improvements in portage to handle these problems but still happen with a single emerge so what do you think will happen with a parallel emerge ?

3. And I agree the only way I can see would be to "&&" or "tee" the output of emerge. The one way you could do it would be to put the out put of emerge into a list an use a for loop. You could then monitor for a stop sig and kick out of the loop.
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junkmonkey · n00b Joined: 28 Oct 2006 Posts: 6

hielvc · Posted: Sat Oct 28, 2006 7:02 pm Post subject:

The only place you dont want to do a CNTRL C is during the install phase or the un-install phase of an emerge. I have tested this feature thourghly since April of 2002

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TheX · Guru Joined: 31 Jul 2004 Posts: 349 Location: .de

if you are updateing the system with

TheX · Guru Joined: 31 Jul 2004 Posts: 349 Location: .de

if one package is always breaking the process but all other should be emerged, you can jump over tho the next package by starting

junkmonkey · n00b Joined: 28 Oct 2006 Posts: 6

Thanks... but it's the stopping the emerge I'm talking about, not the starting it back up again! I'd just like to do it after the current package has finished merging, without me having to sit there and watch for it to finish.

Kasumi_Ninja · Posted: Thu May 10, 2007 5:49 am Post subject:

Genone · Posted: Thu May 10, 2007 6:23 am Post subject:

AllenJB · Veteran Joined: 02 Sep 2005 Posts: 1285

It would be quite nice if there was a method of safely stopping emerge (in a "finish the current package then stop" kind of way). Whether it's catching Ctrl+C or some other method. There are occasionally times when I need to interrupt long emerges for whatever reason (usually 'cause I need the processor back for a while for gaming or something).

I'll also note here that sometimes it seems you have to hit Ctrl+C several times to completely get out of emerge. I suspect this is something to do with multiple simultaneous compiles, or just the build system that the package uses.

Genone:
Am I right in thinking that you're saying that because -u only updates a package and its immediate dependencies, not its entire dep. tree?

Genone · Posted: Fri May 11, 2007 5:03 am Post subject:

L29Ah · n00b Joined: 18 Oct 2010 Posts: 17

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 23452

L29Ah: why are you resurrecting long finished threads? This is the third such thread you raised recently, after you raised the 2010 thread Are you using maintainer-needed packages? on April 14, and then you raised the 2005 thread Default permissions on $HOME on May 9. Raising old threads can be useful if you have a new contribution and the original question was never solved. In this case, I think your answer is not even new:

L29Ah · n00b Joined: 18 Oct 2010 Posts: 17

szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3650

19 years is 7000 days. 10k views is well within reach of spiders indexing stuff.
Just saying.
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.
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Damn, we're growing old!
Anyway, it would be nice to have some way to finish already started jobs and then terminate, but in the absence of such feature Ctrl+C has served me well enough. Interrupting a compilation is safe, even though it wastes some time.
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Slippery Jim · Apprentice Joined: 08 Jan 2005 Posts: 295

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon May 19, 2025 9:38 am Post subject:

Slippery Jim,

In general, topics over a year old are not useful. Gentoo changes too quickly, so it's more productive to start a new topic than resurrect an old topic, that was correct at the time, but is now misleading.
Its a feature of rolling releases.
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Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 23452

Slippery Jim · Apprentice Joined: 08 Jan 2005 Posts: 295

Alright. I'll try to be mindful of that in the future myself. Thanks for the feedback Hu, Neddy.

And FWIW, I think Junkmonkey's idea of hooking a signal in the top-level emerge is probably the correct way to implement what he wanted to do, since it could sensibly manage any currently running parallel child processes, to allow them to complete. Ok, I'll shut up now.