Re: [gentoo-user] world favorites: pros and cons

[Daniel Iliev <danny@ilievnet.com>]

Neil Bothwick wrote:

> 
> so you go to a lot of trouble to circumvent portage's dependency
> handling, then you rely on portage to fix things up after your break
> them. You need to keep lists of what you have merged and unmerged simply
> to compensate for having broken portage's own list for no good reason.

Well I don't have the feeling I go to a lot of trouble and I *absolutely
don't circumvent portage's dependency handling* and I don't see anything
broken in my system even it is about 2 years old.
Keeping lists happens in very rare occasions. Testing a package means I
install, look around and uninstall it. I'm not randomly emerging other
stuff in the mean time.


> What happens if you reboot after unmerging "c", and its absence causes
> the system to fail to boot? What if you remove something that stops
> emerge working?
> 

Highly unlikely. For two reasons:

1) How come that I was able to boot w/o the package in question in first
place? :)
2) The kind of package you're talking about is listed in the system
profile. If you try to remove such a package portage yells out a big fat
warning.


> Gentoo is all about choice, so you are free to choose to use it like
> this, just as you are free to do "rm -fr /*". But don't expect someone to
> come up with a magic fix when things get screwed up.
> 
> 

Correct. And I triggered this discussion here about a different way of
handling packages. A way that is not forbidden neither mentioned as
inappropriate in the official documentation. So there shouldn't be
anything wrong with it, right?
I find your comparison involving "rm -rf /*" to be irrelevant. Using a
system one way or another is not the same as making a "human error".

So far I haven't made the choice of doing "rm -rf /" but actually once I
did "cat /dev/zero > /dev/hda" instead of "cat /dev/zero > /dev/hda2" by
mistake. In cases like this there's no package management system that
could help, no matter if it is portage, apt, yast, swaret or whatever.
Long live the...backups! :)


Last but not least. When it comes to redundant packages in the system.
What happens when you do (the right way?):

1) emerge a
2) "a" pulls-in "b" and "c" as dependencies
3) emerge -C a
4) "a" goes out but "b" and "c" stay there just to take place
5) emerge --depclean

Well...The first thing one can see reads:
" *** WARNING ***  --depclean is known to be broken."

So you prefer to clean the system up using procedure that is "known to
be broken" or you just leave useless packages to take space on your HDDs?

It is my opinion that Gentoo's documentation and portage's behavior
suggest leaving junk packages on your system.
Which indeed is "the right way"?


-- 
Best regards,
Daniel

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