Package Set Configuration
sets.conf locations
There are multiple locations where portage looks for set configuration
files, which are usually named sets.conf. Not all
of these locations have to contain a sets.conf, missing files are simply
ignored.
At first it looks for the default configuration in
/usr/share/portage/config.
The default config includes sets that are expected on all systems and
often critical for normal operation, like world,
system or security.
After that it will read repository specific configurations from
PORTDIR and PORTDIR_OVERLAYthat might
include definitions of sets included in the repository.
Finally a system-specific set configuration may reside in
/etc/portage to either define additional sets or
alter the default and repository sets.
sets.conf Syntax
Unlike other Portage configuration files sets.conf
uses Pythons ConfigParser module, which implements
the syntax usually found in .ini files. At it's core it allows various
named sections that each can contain any number of key-value pairs, see
the Python documentation
for the full details.
In a sets.conf file, a section can define either a
single package set, or a complete class of sets. These cases are handled
in different ways, and will be explained in detail in the following sections.
Single Set Configuration
The configuration of a single set can be very simple as in most cases
it only requires a single option class to be
complete. That option defines which handler class should be used to
create the set. Another universal option available for single sets is
name, however it's usually not needed as the name
of the set is generated from the section name if name
is missing. Some handler classes might require additional
options for their configuration, these will be covered later in
this chapter.
Here are a few examples for single sets taken from the default
configuration file:
# The classic world set
[world]
class = portage.sets.files.WorldSet
# The classic system set
[system]
class = portage.sets.profiles.PackagesSystemSet
Multi Set Configuration
As configuring each single set manually could be quite annoying if
you want many sets with the same options Portage also allows to
define whole classes of sets in a single section. Like with single
sets each section still requires the class option,
but to indicate that the section should generate multiple sets it's
also necessary to set the multiset option to
true.
As it doesn't make much sense to specify a single name for multiple sets
the name option isn't available for multiset sections.
Most handler classes will have a reasonable default for generating names,
and usually you can (but don't have to) set the
name_pattern option to change the naming rules. That
option generally has to include a (handler-specific) placeholder that
will be replaced with a unique identifier (e.g. for category sets the
category name). As with single sets handler classes might require and/or
support additional options, these will be discussed later.
Some examples for multiset configurations:
# generate a set for each file in /etc/portage/sets
# this section is also in the default configuration
[user sets]
class = portage.sets.files.StaticFileSet
multiset = true
directory = /etc/portage/sets
# Generate a set for each category that includes all installed packages
# from that category. The sets will be named <category>/*
[installed category packages]
class = portage.sets.dbapi.CategorySet
multiset = true
repository = vartree
name_pattern = $category/*