cave

Note

Paludis / cave is slow-moving: its last release (3.0.2) and commits date to around March 2025, though the project is not archived and carries no retirement notice.

ID

cave

Home page

https://exherbo.org

Platforms

🐧 Linux (Exherbo Linux only)

Operations

installed · orphans · install · upgrade · upgrade_all · remove · sync · cleanup

purl types

pkg:cave

CLI name

cave

Every call

cave --colour no <command>

Issues and PRs

📦 manager: cave

Source

meta_package_manager/managers/cave.toml

cave is the client of Paludis, Exherbo’s package mangler (https://paludis.exherbo.org).

Parsing notes, verified against the cave man pages (paludis.exherbo.org/clients/):

  • print-ids is the only machine-parseable listing (“No formatting is used, making the output suitable for parsing by scripts”), with a caller-controlled --format; the ‘/::installed’ spec selects the installed repository.

  • No search: cave search emits multi-line human records with no format control, and print-ids --matching needs an exact spec rather than a fuzzy query. No outdated either: the cave resolve plan is human-oriented.

  • resolve never prompts (it refuses risky transactions instead, wanting explicit --permit-* flags), so no assume-yes flag exists or is needed.

  • Execute phases (--execute) and sync need root; plan-only and print-ids calls do not.

What mpm adds to cave

mpm reaches across every manager at once, not cave alone: mpm installed and mpm outdated cover cave alongside every other manager you run in one table, mpm upgrade --all updates them together, and mpm sbom exports the whole machine as one bill of materials.

Every mpm command also gains --dry-run and --plan previews, cross-scheme version comparison and purl identifiers. See manager augmentations for how each one is built.

Your cave commands, in mpm

You already know cave: each operation maps one-to-one onto mpm, in an interface shared by every manager.

To…

With cave

With mpm

List what’s installed

cave print-ids --matching */*::installed --format %c/%p %v\n

mpm --cave installed

Install a package

cave resolve --execute <package_id>

mpm install pkg:cave/<package_id>

Upgrade one package

cave resolve --execute <package_id>

mpm --cave upgrade <package_id>

Upgrade everything

cave resolve --complete world --execute

mpm --cave upgrade --all

Remove a package

cave uninstall --execute <package_id>

mpm remove pkg:cave/<package_id>

List orphaned dependencies

cave purge

mpm --cave orphans

Prefix any command above with --dry-run to simulate the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Operations

Operation

Supported

Notes

installed

✓

outdated

orphans

✓

search

install

✓

upgrade

✓

upgrade_all

✓

remove

✓

sync

✓

cleanup

✓

--orphans runs the system-wide orphan sweep

doctor

Selecting and configuring cave

Deselect cave for a single run with --no-cave, or persist the choice in your configuration:

[mpm]
cave = false

The arguments and environment variables listed in the box atop this page are forced on every cave call, so runs stay quiet, non-interactive and reproducible: the defaults you would set in CI anyway.

Keep it enabled but tune how mpm drives it with a per-manager override:

[mpm.managers.cave]
timeout = 900

mpm config-template cave prints every overridable attribute as a ready-to-paste block.

Recipes

A few jobs you would otherwise script around cave, one mpm command each:

  • Snapshot and clone a machine: mpm --cave dump cave.toml, then mpm restore cave.toml on the next one.

  • Export a compliance SBOM: mpm --cave sbom (CycloneDX by default, --spdx for SPDX).

Privilege escalation

System-wide manager: mpm wraps its privileged operations in sudo out of the box. Instead of letting the tool prompt mid-run, mpm primes the credential cache up-front, with a single branded password prompt at most. Turn escalation off for rootless setups with --no-sudo or the per-manager sudo override.

Root is required for its cleanup_orphan, install, remove, sync, upgrade, upgrade_all operations.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown

State of cave’s release-age gating, from the cooldown support table:

Status: ❌ None (Exherbo, source-based)

A cooldown only pays off where a compromised release can be withdrawn while the clock runs, and can only be emulated where the registry dates its releases. From the retraction table:

  • Registry: Source-based recipe trees

  • Retraction: Index revert of the recipe tree

  • Publish date: ❌ a recipe carries no publication date

With --cooldown set, mpm skips this manager’s install and upgrade operations rather than run them unguarded (fail-closed); --allow-unsupported-managers opts back in.

Version probe

The version is probed by running:

$ cave --version
cave 3.0.1

and extracted with:

r"(?P<version>\d+\.\d+\.\d+)"

Reference traces

Raw native outputs captured in the bundled definition: the reference mpm’s parsers were written against. If you know cave well and a transcript below looks wrong, or a newer release changed its output format, report it.

$ cave print-ids --matching */*::installed --format %c/%p %v\n
app-arch/gzip 1.14
sys-apps/sed 4.9

$ cave purge
Done: 156 metadata, 42 steps

These are the actions I will take, in order:

<   dev-libs/libpcre-8.45:0::installed
    Reasons: purge

<   app-misc/tmux-3.3a:0::installed
    Reasons: purge

Total: 2 uninstalls

Use --execute to perform the actions I described.

Feed any of these through mpm and the raw output becomes one uniform table, the same shape for every manager: filter it, project columns, or export it (mpm --cave installed --output json, or csv, toml, yaml), each package carrying a purl and a version comparable across managers.

Changelog

  • 7.4.0 (2026-07-25)

    • Their cleanup commands, both orphan sweeps (cave purge, pkg_delete -a), are re-declared as cleanup_orphan: cleanup --orphans now reaches them and cleanup --cache leaves them alone.

    • Plain cleanup no longer removes orphaned packages: their native sweeps moved behind cleanup --orphans. This also stops emerge’s cleanup from triggering its pre-depclean world upgrade unless --orphans is given.

  • 7.2.0 (2026-07-09)

    • Add cave (Exherbo’s Paludis client) with installed, install, upgrade, remove, sync and cleanup support; a bundled configuration-defined manager.