remerge is a powerful frontend to Portage and Red Carpet, and allows you to manage packages (pieces of software) installed on your computer. It is written in C++ and includes a built-in HTTP server to minimize its dependencies.
remerge will provide you with a user-friendly way to manage the many packages installed on your Linux system. It makes package installation and removal a simple process, and provides you with a simple search feature to search through all available packages.
Downloads, changelogs, and installation instructions are available on the Downloads page.
remerge will install on Gentoo Linux, Fedora Core 1, 2, and 3, Novell Linux Desktop 9, and SuSE Linux 9.1.
However, you are on your own with Fedora Core 1 and 3, as the Red Carpet support on these distributions is not as complete as on the others.
remerge keeps its own cache of package names and version numbers which allows it to perform searches and display lists of packages much faster than the native package manager (Portage or Red Carpet). These lists must stay up-to-date with the native package manager's list - if they don't, many problems will occur when installing/uninstalling software, and you may not be notified of newer available versions. Synchronizing is especially important on Gentoo, where Portage must be told to go out to the main Portage servers and get new package lists - this is also done when you choose to 'Synchronize Package Lists'.
As you can probably understand, synchronizing is quite important to the proper care, use, and feeding of remerge - please don't forget to sync at least once a week!
Let me guess - you're running remerge 1.2.0 or earlier on Gentoo Linux. You really should just upgrade to remerge 2.0.0 or later - syncing now takes less than a minute!
The reason for the slowness of cache creation on older versions of remerge was the inefficiency of the cache creator. remerge had to process the output of a 'emerge search .*' command - if you've ever run it, you know how long it takes Portage to create the pretty list of all of the packages - quite a while. remerge then has to run the output of that command through a set of regular expressions. All of these operations took quite some time. By eliminating the 'emerge sync .*' part and simply scanning through the preexistant Portage cache, remerge 2.0.0 can sync much more quickly than previous versions could.
remerge is distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later.
Any kind of bug reports, comments, or questions about remerge should be sent to Tim Horton.
You can also send suggestions for new remerge features - if they're reasonable & useful feature additions, I will post a link to your website (if applicable) on the remerge front page at the time of next release (however, I leave this up to my own discretion - if I deem a site inappropriate, forget it!), and perhaps you'll see the feature in a future version of remerge!
As you certainly know, remerge is open source software, and as such, is free for you to download.
If you really like remerge, you can always donate to the project. Any contribution is greatly appreciated!
Tim Horton is the main programmer, leader, and founder of the remerge project.
Cap'n Hector contributed a few ideas and supported me in the development of remerge 2.0.