Re: [gentoo-user] /var/db gone: possible opportunity to switch profile

[Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>]

Francisco Ares writes:

> On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 5:09 PM, Alan McKinnon
> <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 10 Sep 2011 16:41:39 -0300
> > Francisco Ares <frares@gmail.com> wrote:

> > > I have managed to delete /var/db. I know this was a very stupid
> > > thing to be done, but now it is done and /var/db is gone for good.

For every partition I have on my system there is a slightly bigger
partition on my backup drive, and I regularly make snapshots with
rdiff-backup. I wrote a script to automatize this, because it has to be
easy to start the backup, or else I won't do it often enough.

> > > Well, that is a good opportunity to have everything built again,
> > > time to try new CFLAGS, and so on.

And to go amd64 :)  See it as an opportunity to do this. For me, the
biggest advantage compared to x86 was that I could use more memory. Apart
from that, there were not so many differences.


> Yes, that's it, now going from ground up. Pity, this system is being
> upgraded, both hardware and software, since 15+ years. Never had to
> re-install before.

Um, Gentoo started to exist around 2002 according to
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentoo_Linux .

> I guess that shows how portage, all dev-guys, and all helpful people who
> write in this list are really good. Gentoo rocks!

Indeed. I started to use it around early in 2003, when my girlfriend
installed it onto my server. And I continued using it until one year ago,
when the server became obsolete (and finally died only three months
later). I had uptimes of more than a year, and also never had to
re-install.

Before, I had tried various Linux distros, but I always was disappointed
with many things. I hated to upgrade, as this sometimes just did not
work, and often broke things, sometimes more than were fixed. I remember
the dependency hell of RPM, spending much time on rpmfind.net looking  for
packages that were compatible... and then came Gentoo, and these problems
were gone. The rolling upgrades were just great. Over all, things
worked much better. And in case of problems, I often was able to solve
them myself. And I learnt to do things by hand - like configuring ISDN.
When I tried that before on redHat, I ran into a bug of that fancy GUI
utility, that did not make use of my changes until I quit and restarted
it. If you do this yourself by directly configuring stuff in /etc/ppp,
you not only learn more about the whole thing, you also avoid the bugs
that all those GUI utilities seem to have. Simpler seems to be better
here. No additional layers calling for trouble.

	Wonko