Re: [gentoo-user] System maintenance procedure?

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

On Fri, 7 Dec 2012 16:56:18 -0800
Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> wrote:

> > > My unattended daily system maintenance procedure is like this:
> > >
> > > layman -S
> > > emerge --sync
> > > emerge -pvDuN world
> > > emerge -pv --depclean
> > > eclean -p distfiles
> > > eclean -p packages
> > >
> > > And then attended like this:
> > >
> > >
> > > revdep-rebuild
> > > etc-update
> > > elogv
> > > emerge --depclean
> > > eclean distfiles
> > > eclean packages
> > >
> > > Am I missing any good stuff?
> > >
> > > - Grant
> >
> >
> > I'd tweak the order of your attended run:
> >
> > emerge -DuN world
> > emerge @preserved-rebuild
> > emerge --depclean
> > revdep-rebuild
> >
> >
> > The logic is:
> >
> > Rebuild busted packages that portage already knows about
> > (@preserved-rebuild), then get rid of oudated packages and finally
> > revdep-rebuild to fix anything that --depclean broke.
> >
> > @preserved-rebuild is getting very good at what it does lately
> > (supported in all recent portage version including stable IIRC), as
> > is --depclean, so revdep-rebuild seldom finds anything to do these
> > days.
> >
> > --
> > Alan McKinnon
> 
> If revdep-rebuild does everything that @preserved-rebuild does and
> more, why run @preserved-rebuild at all?

@preserved-rebuild does it correctly, does not break your system and
does not leave it in an indeterminate state while you spend hours
trying to figure out what went on.

revdep-rebuild does all those things (and also gets around to fixing
broken libs while taking it's own sweet time to do it).

So they are not really the same thing at all.

Basically, portage removes old .so files when doing upgrades. If the
so-name changes, packages using that file are now broken.
revdep-rebuild was a phase 1 effort to repair that damage after the
fact, and it was good at that.

@preserved-rebuild is a feature in portage that won't remove old .so
files until the last binary linking to it is removed. IOW, things still
work meanwhile. It's analogous to the Unix style of deleting files - if
you app still has a handle to a file and the file is deleted, your app
does not notice the difference as from it's POV the delete has not
happened yet


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com