sakaki- / showem

Utility to monitor the progress of a parallel emerge under Gentoo Linux.

showem

Tool to monitor the progress of a parallel emerge(1) in Gentoo.

31 Oct 2020: sadly, due to legal obligations arising from a recent change in my 'real world' job, I must announce I am standing down as maintainer of this project with immediate effect. For the meantime, I will leave the repo up (for historical interest, and it may be of use to others); however, I plan no further updates, nor will I be accepting / actioning further pull requests or bug reports from this point. Email requests for support will also have to be politely declined, so, please treat this as an effective EOL notice.

For further details, please see my post here.

With sincere apologies, sakaki ><

Description

showem is a very simple utility script, which allows you to monitor the progress of a parallel emerge(1).

When invoked, it shows a split screen display, which updates once a second. The top part shows the tail of the current Portage(5) download log, and the lower part shows the tail of the most recent Portage(5) build log.

The download log display is cleared after 1 minute's inactivity; however, the build log is retained (even if stale) - this allows you to quickly see where a build has failed.

The path of the build log is displayed in the title bar of the window. If the window is resized, the display is adapted automatically to fit; however, a minimum size of 80 columns and 24 rows is required.

Exit showem using Ctrl-c, when done.

Installation

showem is best installed (on Gentoo) via its ebuild, available as part of the sakaki-tools overlay. Full instructions are provided as part of the Sakaki's EFI Install Guide tutorial, on the Gentoo wiki.

showem's Issues

showem not tracking PORTAGE_TMPDIR

I followed the example from here: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Portage_TMPDIR_on_tmpfs to move my portage build dir into a tmpfs. Since then showem has not been tracking the PORTAGE_TMPDIR I'm using through a package.env file so that larger ebuilds don't run out of RAM (firefox, libreoffice, etc). It works just fine for everything that doesn't have the package.env file attached.

Not that big a deal, but I thought you should know.

showem doesn't honor BUILD_PREFIX

I moved my portage tree to a hdd instead of the ssd to avoid excessive wear. I used

PORTAGE_TMPDIR
BUILD_PREFIX

which are setup in /etc/portage/make.conf. showem doesn't find the emerge.log As it is only looking in /var/tmp/portage.