[gentoo-user] Re: System maintenance procedure?

["Steven J. Long" <slong@rathaus.eclipse.co.uk>]

On Tue, Dec 04, 2012 at 04:30:33PM -0800, Grant wrote:
> And then attended like this:
> 
> emerge -DuN world
> revdep-rebuild
> etc-update
> elogv
> emerge --depclean
> eclean distfiles
> eclean packages
> 
> Am I missing any good stuff?

 I've recently modified update[1] to use --changed-use by default, instead
of -N:

 "Unlike --newuse, the --changed-use option does not trigger reinstallation
when flags that the user has not enabled are added or removed." 

 This is great: it does the same thing as skipUseless (a setting we've had
for a couple of years) but means we don't have to show the user what we're
skipping, since portage isn't trying to rebuild it in the first place.

 Also, update does depclean before revdep-rebuild, in case the depclean
breaks anything. (It also picks up on preserved-rebuild, though I switched
back to stable portage a while ago.) Both after glsa-check of course, which
I don't see in your list. (Not that it's actually warned me about anything
in the last few years. ;)

 After the whole thing, it'll run your configUpdater if needed. If not set,
it tries etc-proposals cfg-update dispatch-conf and etc-update in that order.
I use dispatch-conf nowadays, but used to love etc-proposals popping up
in X to tell me when it was done. replace-unmodified, replace-wscomments and
ignore-previously-merged are all really useful (not sure which of those
are default any more, but I definitely had to set a couple to yes when I
installed: pretty sure replace-cvs defaults to yes.)

 With regards to syncing, update -s does the sync first, calling eix-sync
as well if it's installed. We recommend people let eix-sync also update
their overlays with: echo '*' >> /etc/eix-sync.conf
 (I hope that's still correct) or if they're not using eix, to set postSync
to 'layman -S'.
 The sync is nice, as it wraps it to only use one line in the console.

 I'd be interested if there's stuff we should add. I've always been wary
of eclean, and in fact still have all the distfiles and binpkgs this machine
has ever downloaded or installed. Same on my laptop (though it shares
distfiles.) Disk space isn't really an issue any more. But if it's useful to
others, it should be added.

 I really wanted something that keeps the last N versions of binpkgs
(sometimes things start to break, and you get a revbump that doesn't make
things better, and just having the last version isn't enough.) From the
manpage, --package-names --time-limit=6m might be a reasonable compromise.

Hmm think I'll look into adding some sort of hook, though I might not use
it personally: it can just take a set of parameters configured by the admin.

[1] http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-546828.html

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