[gentoo-user] Update or Install again? Testing vs. stable?

[gentoo-user] Update or Install again? Testing vs. stable?

[Alan E. Davis]

I have questions (for one of my machines, running ~amd64) whether it
is worth it to update/upgrade or whether to reinstall from scratch.
Another machine that melted down three months ago is being rebuilt
with a new motherboard, and new technology; I am installing from
scratch for obvious reasons in this case; but I would like to solicit
comments about my plan to use only a straight stable version (with
single packages unmasked only).  I'll try to be brief, but I beg in
advance the indulgence of the list for an overlength posting.  And I
apologize for going over territory once again that has been covered
elsewhere.

My ~amd64 machine has an extremely large number of packages, many of
them for multimedia viewing, DVD burning, editing DVDs, graphics,
latex---a large variety of applications many of them which can be used
simultaneously at any given time.  The system is amazing, and I
suspect that any other distro would fall over under this diversity of
processes.  In particular, I have had good success editing videos with
avidemux---but only with the most up to date overlay!  The machine has
gotten tangled into a knot that seems to be almost impossible to get
all the way up to date at one time.  At least for me.  I received
amazingly clear and lucid advice on how to get up to date, upgrade the
compiler, and rebuild, revdep-rebuild, etc., etc.; but with my
unreliable connectivity over the summer, I was unable to get the
machine to an absolutely clean state to start that process.

It took a tremendous amount of time, months, to setup all of these
packages; maintenance of the system also demands not only a fast
network connection, but also a lot of time.  It's not going to be easy
to reinstall this system in it's current form.  Perhaps it's
necessary, however.  The usual advice about updating is something like
"it isn't necessary; there is no such thing as versions with Gentoo".
But with at least three major upgrade bugs to overcome (xorg-x11 /
nvidia-drivers; compiler upgrades; revdep-rebuild failures; changes in
network administration, to name a few issues) I wonder whether it
isn't just as easy to install afresh.

Because my time is taken up with teaching and science, I don't have
unlimited time for system maintenance.  I need to have access to
recent updates of some software packages, like avidemux, which only in
recent incarnations has been able to deal with the avi files my video
capture device generates.   So I am thinking to run a stable (amd64 or
x86) version, and only install the necessary packages as ~arch.  I
want to ask the intelligentsia how much difference will that make.  I
am afraid I have not been as useful to the group as I might have been
at reporting bugs, but I found a large number of packages able to run
amd64.

The same goes for the newly cobbled together machine with an amd64
processor, and a gateway laptop that has been running gentoo but I've
been running on Ubuntu because of trouble understanding the docs on
how to use WPA authentication on the school wireless network.  I am
going to either reinstall gentoo or (if I haven't buggered it yet)
upgrade, so the same questions apply.

I might add that my experience with Ubuntu, after running gentoo only
for 9 months, has been interesting: Ubuntu is pretty amazing, but it
has nowhere near the polish of Gentoo.  The newest betas are really
amazing---edgy eft knot2, and the new Gnome very interesting; however,
at almost every turn the Gentoo packages, out of the box with fairly
mundane USE flags, are MUCH more serviceable, the details have been
taken care of, and I believe Gentoo to be much more stable.

TIA,

Alan Davis
-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  lngndvs@gmail.com     1-670-256-2043

I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I
must share it with other people who like it.
                                          --------Richard Stallman
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Update or Install again? Testing vs. stable?

[Richard Fish]

On 9/13/06, Alan E. Davis <lngndvs@gmail.com> wrote:
> It took a tremendous amount of time, months, to setup all of these
> packages; maintenance of the system also demands not only a fast
> network connection, but also a lot of time.  It's not going to be easy
> to reinstall this system in it's current form.  Perhaps it's
> necessary, however.

I think at this point you have two options:

1. Reinstall the system using the curernt 2006.1 AMD media.

Advantages:
- you can use the GRP binary packages to do a quick update.
- you avoid recompiling everything for the gcc update
- updating to current should be a fairly small change

Disadvantages:
- You need to be sure to backup your configuration files, or you may
lose something that took a long time to get right.
- If you have/make a lot of changes to USE, you may have a lot of
things that need to be rebuilt after you are "done" with the install.

If you do this, be sure to backup your configuration files, especially
/etc/portage, /etc/make.conf.  Plus you probably want to keep
/var/lib/portage/world as well.

2. Remove ~amd64 from keywords, and basically follow the gcc upgrade
guide, since you probably need to udpate to gcc 4.1 anyway.

Advantages:
- It's relatively easy to see what things are going to be downgraded,
so you can decide what needs to be added to package.keywords.
- Your configuration files will be protected by CONFIG_PROTECT.

Disadvantages:
- You end up doing an emerge -e world, which is going to take quite a
while to execute.


>From a general perspective on running some ~arch packages on an
otherwise stable system, how successful that is usually depends on how
many ~arch packages you have.  ~arch packages tend to depend on other
~arch things, so there is a viral effect that leads some people to
give up and use ~arch for the entire system.  Using the
~cate-gory/package-ver.s.ion syntax can help here, as it only allows
the ~arch keyword for specific versions or -r releases.

HTH,
-Richard
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gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Update or Install again? Testing vs. stable?

[Bo Ørsted Andresen]

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On Thursday 14 September 2006 07:03, Richard Fish wrote:
> 2. Remove ~amd64 from keywords, and basically follow the gcc upgrade
> guide, since you probably need to udpate to gcc 4.1 anyway.
>
> Advantages:
> - It's relatively easy to see what things are going to be downgraded,
> so you can decide what needs to be added to package.keywords.

One warning that should be given regarding any downgrade is that downgrading 
glibc is going to hose any system! Since the newest glibc in portage is 
stable at the moment this isn't currently an issue but still for future 
reference the warning should be given.

Further I may add that I recently went through a downgrade from ~x86 to x86 on 
a desktop system and since I had been using ggc-4.1.1 for almost 3 months I 
decided not to use revdep-rebuild rather than emerge -e world.

The only real problem I experienced was the dev-libs/expat downgrade from 
2.0.0 to 1.95.8. revdep-rebuild doesn't have a clue about the order in which 
to recompile all the packages that break by this so if I hadn't been able to 
figure that out the revdep-rebuild method would definitely have taken a lot 
longer than emerge -e world (because most builds failed until the correct 
packages had been remerged in the correct order). I would, however, expect 
that it would be quite painless if emerge -e world was performed.

Of course given the bugs that are still open on bug #140707 as has been 
discussed on this list during the last couple of weeks you should expect that 
a few packages will require ~x86 keywording until they are stabilised.

Having said all this a agree with Richard about this question.

-- 
Bo Andresen

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Re: [gentoo-user] Update or Install again? Testing vs. stable?

[Bo Ørsted Andresen]

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On Friday 15 September 2006 07:52, Rumen Yotov wrote:
> Just a sidenote here, if knowing you'll have to rebuild after expat
> downgrade you could run "revdep-rebuild --library libexpat.so.1" before
> and save the order/list of packages.

Of course, however, revdep-rebuild still don't have a clue about the order in 
which to emerge the packages...

-- 
Bo Andresen

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Re: [gentoo-user] Update or Install again? Testing vs. stable?

[Rumen Yotov]

On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 09:27:06 +0200
Bo Ørsted Andresen <bo.andresen@zlin.dk> wrote:

> On Friday 15 September 2006 07:52, Rumen Yotov wrote:
> > Just a sidenote here, if knowing you'll have to rebuild after expat
> > downgrade you could run "revdep-rebuild --library libexpat.so.1"
> > before and save the order/list of packages.
> 
> Of course, however, revdep-rebuild still don't have a clue about the
> order in which to emerge the packages...
> 
Hi,
IMHO the cause is that some of the packages which resolv files -->
packages are linked to the old libexpat.so.X so doesn't work in the
final ident&order phase.
Rumen

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gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

[gentoo-user] Update or Install again? Testing vs. stable?

[Alan E. Davis]

I have questions (for one of my machines, running ~amd64) whether it
is worth it to update/upgrade or whether to reinstall from scratch.
Another machine that melted down three months ago is being rebuilt
with a new motherboard, and new technology; I am installing from
scratch for obvious reasons in this case; but I would like to solicit
comments about my proposal to use only a straight stable version.
I'll try to be brief, but I beg in advance the indulgence of the list
for an overlength posting.  And I apologize for going over territory
once again that has been covered elsewhere.

My ~amd64 machine has an extremely large number of packages, many of
them for multimedia viewing, dvd burning, editing dvds, graphics,
latex---a large variety of applications many of them which can be used
simultaneously at any given time.  The system is amazing, and I
suspect that any other distro would fall over under this diversity of
processes.  In particular, I have had good success editing videos with
avidemux---but only with the most up to date overlay!  The machine has
gotten tangled into a knot that seems to be almost impossible to get
all the way up to date at one time.  At least for me.  I received
amazingly clear and lucid advice on how to get up to date, upgrade the
compiler, and rebuild, revdep-rebuild, etc., etc.; but with my
unreliable connectivity over the summer, I was unable to get the
machine to the absolutely clean state to start that process.

It took a tremendous about of time to setup all of these packages;
maintainence of the system also demands not only a fast network
connection, but also a lot of time.  It's not going to be easy to
reinstall this system in it's current form.  Perhaps it's necessary,
however.  The usual advice about updating is something like "it isn't
necessary; there is no such thing as versions with Gentoo".  But with
at least three major upgrade bugs to overcome (xorg-x11 /
nvidia-drivers; compiler upgrades; revdep-rebuild failures; changes in
network administration, to name a few issues) I wonder whether it
isn't just as easy to install afresh.

Because my time is taken up with teaching and leftover time should be
spent on science, I don't have unlimited time for system maintainence


Because one of my machines melted down in June, I am preparing to
reinstall Gentoo.  My connectivity has been sporadic over the summer;
maybe it's improving; we might get a DSL soon at home.  My home
machine was installed and maintained almost exclusively over a dialup
connection.




-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  lngndvs@gmail.com     1-670-256-2043

I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I
must share it with other people who like it.
                                          --------Richard Stallman
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list