[kde-linux] Re: LCD weather widget not finding noaa stations

[Duncan]

Dale posted on Tue, 03 May 2011 05:20:12 -0500 as excerpted:

> Duncan wrote:

>> What I did here with the one upgrade related bug I had

> Well, I don't guess this will work.  Ran into a slight problem:

> It appears that when 4.6.2 was added, they removed 4.6.1.  I'll look to
> see if I still have a binary tho.  May unpack it and see what is
> different first, if I have it still.

Yes indeed.  Fortunately for the bug I mentioned above, I hadn't cleared 
out the binpkgs for 4.6.0 and 4.6.1, so it was easy enough to use them.

Just in case you weren't aware, the binpkg format is simply a tarball of 
the files as they'd install (from the fake-install immediately prior to 
what would be the qmerge step if FEATURES=-binpkg), with some extra data 
glued on the end.  It's possible to open and browse the tarball content 
using most archivers, including both ark and mc's virtual tarball 
filesystem.

Additionally, if you edit the file itself, near the end you'll find the 
actual ebuild used, as plain text.  Of course you can also use qxpak from 
the portage-utils package to unpack the entire thing, but I usually simply 
grab the plain text ebuild with a simple text editor, if that's all I 
need.  (It usually is, short term anyway.  Longer term, the in-tree/in-
overlay eclasses might change in an incompatible way since they don't have 
to worry about compatibility with the removed ebuild any longer, thus 
making use of the ebuild-only difficult without the environmental data 
contained in the rest of the xpak.)

So using something like mc, which can diff between comparable files in two 
different tarballs directly, no manual extracting required (I think it 
does that to a temp area on its own but it's all automatic if so, and it 
may handle it entirely in memory for small files), it's quite possible 
indeed to see what has changed, either in filesystem layout and filenames, 
or between two config files, say, while working with just the binpkgs 
without even extracting them let alone installing them.

And if you need the ebuild, grabbing it from the binpkg is easy enough as 
well, tho as I said, if they've changed the eclasses it depends on in the 
mean time, you may have a bit more work to worry about than just the 
ebuild, but they too can be recovered from the xpak if necessary, thus 
giving one the necessary bits to do a from-source rebuild as well as 
simply using the existing binpkg, should that be necessary.

Of course it's also possible to recover the old ebuilds and related 
eclasses from Gentoo's tree repo (and/or gentoo/kde's git repo for the 
overlay), if one wishes, but it's nice to know the data is available 
locally too, as long as you still have the binpkgs, and it's often more 
convenient to simply recover it that way.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman