When using Gentoo, there are some areas of the OS that are kludgy and remains from 2002 at best. If you want to overcome these areas, you can try a few tools. Also, a short history lesson is in order if you have only recently started using Gentoo.

Up until around 2013, gentoolkit was more-or-less required for smooth operation of a Gentoo system. This package includes the revdep-rebuild(1) utility, which was used to restore anything that emerge broke after clearing dependencies (usually after a world update). gentoolkit itself is a great package and I highly recommend it if you are using Gentoo or Funtoo, because it also includes equery(1). If you want to read more about equery, read the man page or look at gentoolkit documentation

Now revdep-rebuild isn't needed, and you don't really have to use equery. However, equery is still a nice utility and gentoolkit is overall a nice package to have on your system if you do not mind a small amount of bloat for a large amount of gentoo-specific control and power.



Next on the list we have eix(1). eix builds a database of your portage tree and searches it in a similar way to mlocate (you update the database file and near-instantly search it). This eliminates the time that the --search function of emerge(1) takes, and also shows you ricey displays of active and inactive USE flags, and has a display and color coded symbol for every possible thing you would want to know, as well as unique notifications during database updates.

After installing eix, updating your portage tree with emerge --sync is no longer encouraged; instead you can use eix-sync, which calls emerge --sync and then eix-update, updating your portage trees and eix database in one shot for easy ebuild/package querying. Nice!

More to come, but this needs to be out there for anyone trying to use a Gentoo-based system.