Re: [gentoo-amd64] backups and world updates

[Brett Johnson <brett@blzj.com>]

Mark wrote:
> Thanks to everyone who helped me get my system back after a couple of
> world update snafus. Now of course I'm a little gun-shy about using
> options like emerge --update world. So what's my best bet to keep my
> system up to date, while protecting it from my own lack of
> understanding of updating config files?
> 
> Here's what I'm intending to do so far:
> 
> 1. Prior to running any large system update, back up /etc to another location
> 2. use dispatch-conf instead of etc-update
> 
> Can anyone make any other suggestions? Which emerge options are best
> for full system updates? Thanks

I would suggest doing updates on a very regular basis. I saw a script in
the gentoo forums once, where the script ran every night and updated the
portage tree, downloaded and built all the new packages (but not install
them) and emailed the list of packages to be installed. I have not
gotten that ambitious yet, I just update my portage tree every night,
and try run an "emerge -puvD world" once a week on all my systems to see
what needs to be updated. If you stay on top of updates, they are much
easier to handle. (I know this because I have neglected my laptop for
about 6 months now, and now I have been stuck updating it for the past 2
days....)

I have also found that using dispatch-conf with rcs and colordiff helps
a lot too. http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Colorized_Config_Management shows
how to colorize the diff for etc-update and dispatch.conf.
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