Re: [gentoo-user] How should I clean up my broken system?

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

On Saturday 13 February 2010 19:51:05 Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> Thanks!  In the end, I just used the gcc I had on the system anyway; it
> wasn't broken.  I first did 'emerge -e gcc', which took an hour, then did
> 'emerge -e world', which took ~2 hours 30 mins.
> 
> I was being a bit paranoid.  The reason I "gave up" on the installation
> CD was I failed to find out how to start my LVM2 voluble logics, or
> whatever they're called.

Oh yes, I forgot about that. I have old LiveCDs around too that don't support 
LVM. It can get bloody annoying when you forget and use it anyway. These days 
I use RIPLinux on a small spare USB stick as my rescue system


> I'm now back on track, setting up my PC.  Thanks!
> 
> > The paranoid might want to emerge gcc itself on it's own first so that
> > rebuilding world is done with the same gcc version as what it will
> > become (gcc is not built first when you rebuild world, all sort of
> > toolchain tools and parsers are earlier in the list). Personally, I
> > don't do that - there is an actual chance that using an old compiler to
> > build a new compiler may lead to incompatibility issues, but the risk
> > is extremely small and rare, and it's never bitten me.
> 
> There was that apocryphal tale of the origianl Unix hacker who hardwired
> a backdoor login into the system, and hacked cc to keep inserting the
> backdoor each time the system was built, and to keep this hack in cc each
> time cc was compiled.  Whew!

That's not a myth either :-)

There was a story on /. about that very thing just the other day!


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com