3

Is there an easy way to migrate from archlinux to gentoo? For example I get a list of manually installed packages in archlinux by pacman -Qeq, save it to file and edit (to delete all unneeded packages).

I'd like then to install that list of packages by emerge, but many packages have different names in gentoo and arch. Is there a way of automation of such package names conversion? Or I need to install package from list by hands, one by one?

Improve this question
9
  • 1
    You're better off doing it manually. That's just what Gentoo is like - you make your own rules, set your own USE flags, you know what is installed and why. Any kind of automation (even just an automated install) would give you a Gentoo system you probably wouldn't know how to maintain.
    – frostschutz
    Commented Mar 25, 2013 at 18:14
  • @frostschutz That's bad: I have near 200 manually installed packages. Installation of some packages (with dependencies) is a very long process (for an hour or more), that's why I want to add some automation.
    – Eddy_Em
    Commented Mar 25, 2013 at 18:20
  • 3
    Get used to long compilation times, it comes with the territory :)
    – jasonwryan
    Commented Mar 25, 2013 at 19:55
  • When I have to manually compile software on my workstation, I do so in my home directory, mostly for this reason.
    – jordanm
    Commented Mar 25, 2013 at 21:40
  • 1
    @jordanm, I compile gentoo in chroot. I want first to install all packages needed for work, after that to setup everything (taking configuration files from arch) and only after that I will copy whole root directory to real partition (flash card) and try to reboot it. If everything would be OK, I will delete archlinux and copy gentoo instead of that dead system.
    – Eddy_Em
    Commented Mar 26, 2013 at 4:41

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
2

There is no easy way.

pacman and portage are very different and have no connection to each other and as @frostschutz said manual step by step installation with understanding and customization on each step is the most sane reason to use Gentoo so it's just weird idea, at least in my understanding of things.

Improve this answer
1

There is a way to do some automation; and it is not by using the list of Arch Linux packages or installing an alternative solutin, but instead by using the list of installed files.

Meet PFL; the Portage File List, which keeps track of which files belong to which packages. So, theoretically, you could download the MySQL dump of PFL database (because you don't want to flood their server) and then query your entire partition against that database. As an end result, you should have a quite extensive list; it won't cover everything, but it should cover most.

What you do now is not throw this list into Portage; there is a good reason for that, which is that you don't want to explicitly merge dependencies. So, you will want to remove anything from your list which contains libs/ or /lib to start with; that won't be enough, so you will want to do another manual run over it to ensure that it only contains the applications you actually use. Dependencies like libraries will be automatically pulled; so, they don't need to be explicitly merged. Explicitly merging them will be disadvantageous, because you are likely to pull incorrect versions.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .