eselect User Guide

1.  Introduction

A Brief Overview

eselect is a tool for administration and configuration on Gentoo systems. It will modify the system's behaviour and should be used with care by the system administrator. eselect is a modular framework for writing configuration utilities. It consists of:

• A main program called eselect.
• Various modules (*.eselect files) which carry out different tasks.
• Several libraries which help ensure consistent behaviour and simplify the creation of new modules.

A module provides several actions. Actions typically either display some information (list and show actions are common) or update the system somehow (for example, set and update). Each module also provides help and usage actions which explain how to use the module.

Advantages for end users and System Administrators

For system administrators and end users, tools written as eselect modules offer several advantages over the traditional "write each tool from scratch" approach:

• Consistent UI – eselect modules provide a consistent user interface. Thanks to eselect's action framework, there is no longer any need to remember or look up dozens of -x style switches for each tool. The output format used by modules is also standardised.
• Consistent help format – All eselect modules provide easily accessible help documentation via the help and usage actions.
• Consistent tool naming – There is no need to remember dozens of foo-config and update-blah names. To see a list of available tools, simply run eselect with no arguments. Of course the foo-config style are still available (via symlinks) if you prefer them.
• Guaranteed support for $ROOT – For those of you using $ROOT, you will not have to worry about whether a particular tool can handle it. Support for $ROOT is required for all eselect modules.

Advantages for Developers and Package Maintainers

Writing your tool as an eselect module rather than starting from scratch gives you various benefits:

• Faster development time – Much of the work has already been done for you. eselect provides a series of libraries for common tasks, and the main eselect program handles most of the hard work for you. All you need to do is provide the actions and any domain specific functions you require.
• Automatic actions – The help and usage actions are automatically generated from your actions, so there is no need to spend time worrying about keeping these written up to date.
• Easy, consistent behaviour – Because most of the input, output and command line handling is split off into library functions, writing a "standard" module which behaves consistently with other tools is very simple.
• Familiar format – For Gentoo developers, the eselect module format will be very familiar – it is a bash file with a structure that is quite similar to ebuilds.

2.  Using eselect

Usage

eselect should be called as shown below.

# eselect [<global options>] <module> <action> <options>

eselect features consistently name actions amongst most of its modules. eselect list-modules will show a list of available modules. There is only one global option as of now; --no-color, which asks eselect to stop showing colored output, which is the default. The following are the standard action names – each module may provide a subset of these actions:

• help – Print the modules help screen.
• usage – Print information on how to invoke the modules actions.
• version – Print the modules version and other useful information.
• list – Prints a set of selectable options.
• show – Prints the currently active configuration(s).
• set – Select one of the options offered by list.
• enable – Enable one of the module specific features.
• disable – Disable one of the module specific features.
• update – Like set, but automatically selects an option rather than taking a parameter.
• scan – Gather information about the system and store it for future usage by the module.

A typical session will look like the following for most modules:

(Find out options for a module)
# eselect <module> list
These selections are available:
	[1]<first>
	[2]<second>
(Set an option)
# eselect <module> set <first>
(Display the current config)
# eselect <module> show
Active Selection:
	<item1>

You can usually set items either by name or number.

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