Yes, I am bored. Again. So, I want to try some packages, the question is how can I find those packages? On Gentoo, it’s amazingly easy.


diff <(genlop -ln | sed 's/.* >>> \(.*\/.*\)-[0-9.]\+.*/\1/' \
                  | sort | uniq) \
     <(eix -! -I $@ --only-names) \
     | sed -n '/>/ s/> //p'

This, never-installed-packages.sh, gives you a list of packages you have never installed before.

The first part uses genlop to list all packages have ever been installed, sed to remove unneeded part, then reduces to one package one entry only. The second part lists all packages which are not installed, with eix, this is simple. diff compares two lists and sed grabs the final list we want.

On my Gentoo, 14,796 packages out of 16,020 packages, in current Portage tree, which I have never installed before. 92.36% of packages are totally new to me!

Almost 15K packages, that’s a lot, really a lot. There is no way I would try every one of them. I will have to filter the list with more criteria, for example, I would not try KDE or GNOME packages, you can:


never-installed-packages.sh -! -\( -C kde -o -C gnome -\)

I think I will start with command-line and text-based programs first. And if you are feeling lucky:


never-installed-packages.sh | shuf -n 10 | xargs -n 1 eix
# or shuf -n 10 -> sort -R | head -10

Related posts: eix