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I have been reading the Portage manual and i thought it was a good idea to create a /etc/portage/package.mask file for the Xbox which would prevent portage from updating certain software that needs special patchs to work with the xbox ala alsa, xfree, kernel
If i could get the software and versions needed i would be more then willing to build this file so shallex could put it into gentoox and it would save people doing emerge updates to not accidently overwrite software.. Again just an idea.

also i was looking and it looks like emerge --inject is depreciated in latest versions of portage and they suggest using the package.mask file which is why i am suggesting this.

I don't see how you can replace inject with package.mask
inject makes portage think a package is installed,
If I wanted to install a media package on the xbox that depends on alsa, portage would try to install alsa as it is not installed with portage. To stop this happening I would inject alsa. Putting alsa into the package.mask file would just make the ebuild fail saying it couldn't satisfy the dependencies.

Also you don't have to worry about xfree being updated as it's no longer in portage and the kernel isn't installed using portage so that doesn't get updated

I've had a bit of a poke around, it seems that --inject is to be replaced by package.mask and package.provided depending on the reason for using --inject

In this situation you would use package.provided because you are providing alsa yourself. You would use package.mask to stop xfree from being updated (but you don't need to do this anymore)

thanks for the responses.
But isn't it if you use package.provided it will still try to upgrade to latest version of alsa if there is as currently there is 1.0.7 sitting in portage. From what i understand useing the provided it just wouldn't reinstall 1.0.4 or deal anything with that.

Well, the good news is... ALSA have included an Xbox patch... so when that makes it as stable in Portage the alsa patch can be removed.

what version of that included it?

Not sure.

Ok thanks for the info.. i guess will look forward to it when ever it gets added and stable into portage.

Schultz wrote:thanks for the responses.
But isn't it if you use package.provided it will still try to upgrade to latest version of alsa if there is as currently there is 1.0.7 sitting in portage. From what i understand useing the provided it just wouldn't reinstall 1.0.4 or deal anything with that.

Good point, you probablly need to use both files, i.e provide the alsa you have installed and mask anything above that

Funny you should bring all this stuff up.. I've had to do something similar just this minute to stop xorg from deprecating xfree.