Re: [gentoo-user] Update After A Year

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Thursday 10 January 2008, Tamas Sarga wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I moved from my flat a year ago, and now I' went back. At my
> temporary place I wasn't be able to reach the internet, so I didn't
> update the system. Now I'd like to update it. Should I do anything
> special in addition to an emerge -e system; emerge -e world? Are
> there anything I should attend to?

Generally you can just emerge -uND world and we done with it. But life 
isn't always so simple. I can think of a few updates in the last while 
that were problematic, but I think they were all more than a year ago:

Xorg 6.x -> 7.x  - there's wiki pages for that at gentoo-wiki.com
gcc-3.3.x -> 3.4.x - check gentoo.org/docs for the full info
glibc-2.3 -> 2.4 - there was something about that too, I forget...
The update to python-2.5 had a specific procedure (?)
And there was a portage update as well with a change in on-disk format. 
This one caught me, as an upgrade path was maintained for several 
versions, then dropped. My upgrade fell in that window. But that was 
way back in the early 2.0 versions, I think you will be safe.

Oddly, kde-3.5.7 to 3.5.8 recently was a pain for me. I hadn't updated 
in two months and the first emerge world failed about 8 times, all on 
kde stuff. It felt as if the DEPENDS were evaluated in the wrong order 
as emerge --resume --skipfirst allowed it to continue. Then I would 
emerge world again with less failures, and do it again. IIRC it took 4 
runs thorough, but once it was done everything did seem to work 
correctly.

With long intervals between updates like you have here, I prefer to make 
a quickpkg of vital system stuff (gcc, glibc, python, portage, bash) as 
a safety measure, then run emerge -pvuND system and update those vital 
packages manually - the reason is to force me to look at the portage 
output and not miss important messages. Then emerge the rest of system 
followed by the rest of world. It's the long way round but it gives me 
the warm fuzzy safety net feeling.


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
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