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Concept
Portage (software)
Summary
Portage is a package management system originally created for and used by Gentoo Linux and also by ChromeOS, Calculate, Sabayon, and Funtoo Linux among others. Portage is based on the concept of ports collections. Gentoo is sometimes referred to as a meta-distribution due to the extreme flexibility of Portage, which makes it operating-system-independent. The Gentoo/Alt project was concerned with using Portage to manage other operating systems, such as BSDs, macOS and Solaris. The most notable of these implementations is the Gentoo/FreeBSD project.
There is an ongoing effort called the Package Manager Specification project (PMS), which aims to standardise and document the behaviour of Portage, allowing the ebuild tree and Gentoo system packages to be used with alternative package managers such as Paludis and pkgcore. Its goal is to specify the exact set of features and behaviour of package managers and ebuilds, serving as an authoritative reference for Portage.
Portage is similar to the BSD-style package management known as ports, and was originally designed with FreeBSD's ports in mind. Portage is written in the Python programming language, and is the main utility that defines Gentoo. Although the system itself is known as Portage, it consists of two main parts, the ebuild system and emerge. The ebuild system takes care of the actual work of building and installing packages, while emerge provides an interface to ebuild: managing an ebuild repository, resolving dependencies and similar issues. (These two therefore have roughly the same relation as rpm has with yum, or dpkg has with APT.)
A GTK+-based GUI, Porthole, is available for working with Portage.
There is also the Himerge GUI, which stands for "Haskell Interface for eMerge".
Portage is characterized by its main function: compiling from source code the packages the user wishes to install. In doing so it allows customization of compiler and target-application options to fit the system's specifications and the user's own wishes.
Official source
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