Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Heads up: Your system might be broken and/or insecure due to serious patch-2.6 bug

[Philip Webb <purslow@ca.inter.net>]

091205 Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
> On Samstag 05 Dezember 2009, Philip Webb wrote:
>> Also, I never do a bald 'emerge world'. I look thro' the output of
>> 'eix-sync', write -- with a pencil+paper -- a list of installed pkgs which
>> have changed, run 'emerge -Dup world' to see what order of emerging is
>> recommended, then individually 'emerge -pv <pkg>' & -- if all looks well
>> -- 'emerge <pkg>'. Yes, it takes a bit longer for my weekly update session
>> (tomorrow Sat), but I don't risk the nightmare of reducing my system to
>> chaos with all the extra frantic labor which would result.
> which f*cks up world and is a very bad idea.
> Really, emerging every single package?
> 'world' is useless for you and cleaning unused deps a nightmare.

Please read what I said & hopefully think briefly before responding.
If the pkg is already in 'world', it's 'emerge <pkg>';
if not -- the more frequent case -- , it's 'emerge -1 <pkg>'.
That keeps everything in order (yes, you have to watch what you do).

> The easy way to avoid problems are BINPKGs.
> Use it and a downgrade in case of problems only takes seconds.

Yes, I do have 'FEATURES="buildsyspkg"' in 'make.conf', of course,
but I've never needed to make use of those emergency files.

My general point is that Gentoo is about managing your own system
rather than relying on someone out there to do it for you;
IMO binary distros are closer to using M$ or Apple than they are to Gentoo
& relying on 'emerge world' is closer to binary distros than to true Gentoo.
'world' is a less important part of Gentoo than many users believe:
IIRC it was imitated from FreeBSD by Gentoo's founder in the early days.
My recommendation is to put a bit more time into regular updates
& thereby reduce the chance that you'll need to fix a major breakdown;
also as said, if you want to do real testing, use a dedicated system
on another partition or (safest) another machine altogether.

Otherwise, thanks for the thoughtful comments by others.

-- 
========================,,============================================
SUPPORT     ___________//___,   Philip Webb
ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|   Cities Centre, University of Toronto
TRANSIT    `-O----------O---'   purslowatchassdotutorontodotca