[gentoo-embedded] tzdata & friends

[Marcus Priesch <marcus@priesch.priv.at>]

Hi Guys,

One annoying thing i encountered in the past when using gentoo on a
linux box was staying up to date with packages (like timzonedata &
pytz).

when you want to stay in sync with the portage tree - you also have to
update a lot of other packages from time to time ... which alters the
system and possibly needs other work to be involved to keep it
running ... in the end you have to test the whole behaviour again and
the customer gets a "new" system - which is lot of work and hard to
argument ;)

when you dont update, timezonedata could be out of date ... and the
customer discovers that DST change did not happen correctly ... which is
also hard to argument ;)

so basically i am searching for a solution where i can update "only"
relevant packages from time to time (like timezonedata) but leave the
rest of the system untouched ... customers boxes are running in a
private lan so security is not really a concern ;)

currently the only way i can think of is to maintain a private portage
tree and update packages selectively - as long as the dependencies dont
require more ... are there any other possibilities ?!? how are you
handling such situations ?!?

the other question is on distributing the packages to the boxes:

in the past i had a full gentoo system where i updated and compiled and
rsynced selectively to the boxes - but with full dev environment which
was clearly a waste of storage space, time and bandwith.

currently i have one --root created and stripped down environment which
i rsync to the boxes (without gcc, portage tree, kernel sources) ...
plus i need a gentoo system for building where i merge change into the
portage tree from time to time ...

the complexity of this is why i took a look at debian/ubuntu for this
kind of task ... but ... for me it's not an option as it's tooo
inflexible.

after all i should come up with a solution where the customer can do the
update on its own ... 

so any ideas and/or discussion would be very welcome !!!

regards,
marcus.