It's been much less than a year since I've updated last, however I'm experiencing problems updating my system. First off, I have Gentoo 2007.0 installed on an AMD64 X2 3800+ (SMP kernel.) I cannot upgrade PAM from 0.99.8.1-r1 to 0.99.9.0. The output of trying to do so is the following:

emerge pam
Calculating dependencies... done!
>>> Verifying ebuild Manifests...

>>> Emerging (1 of 1) sys-libs/pam-0.99.9.0 to /
* Linux-PAM-0.99.9.0.tar.bz2 RMD160 SHA1 SHA256 size ;-) ...             [ ok ]
* checking ebuild checksums ;-) ...                                      [ ok ]
* checking auxfile checksums ;-) ...                                     [ ok ]
* checking miscfile checksums ;-) ...                                    [ ok ]
* checking Linux-PAM-0.99.9.0.tar.bz2 ;-) ...                            [ ok ]
*
* Your current setup is using one or more of the following modules,
* that are not built or supported anymore:
* pam_pwdb, pam_radius, pam_timestamp, pam_console
* If you are in real need for these modules, please contact the maintainers
* of PAM through http://bugs.gentoo.org/ providing information about its
* use cases.
* Please also make sure to read the PAM Upgrade guide at the following URL:
*   http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/pam/upgrade-0.99.xml
*

'emerge --search pam' returns the following (I'm only going to include the actual listing for pam, and not all the other stuff it lists to keep the list short)

* sys-libs/pam
      Latest version available: 0.99.9.0
      Latest version installed: 0.99.8.1-r1
      Size of files: 887 kB
      Homepage:      http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/pam/
      Description:   Linux-PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules)
      License:       PAM

I've followed the Linux-PAM upgrade guide, which didn't mention what to do in the event that those modules were used.

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/pam/upgrade-0.99.xml

There is a forum discussion on this matter, however none of the modules appear in /etc/pam.d/ files...

I don't know enough about PAM and Gentoo to know if running a PAMless system would cause problems, I have been using linux for a while, but I am relatively new to Gentoo (and yes, I realize that PAM is not exclusive to Gentoo...) I've tried the #gentoo channel on FreeNode and after an hour of asking and waiting, was unable to receive an answer.

Any help would be appriciated.

Thanks!
Hal Martin

Neil Bothwick wrote:

On Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:57:57 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:

Generally you can just emerge -uND world and we done with it. But life 
isn't always so simple. I can think of a few updates in the last while 
that were problematic, but I think they were all more than a year ago:


The expat upgrade was less than a year ago for stable systems.

I'd go with emerge -auvDN system and check the output carefully before
opting to proceed. I'd also make sure that ELOG is correctly set up in
make.conf so you don't miss any important massages.

After updating system, it would be prudent to run revdep-rebuild before
moving onto the rest of world.

emerge -e is pointless, portage is quite capable of determining what
needs to be updated, and reemerging everything just creates noise and
confusion that could make it harder to deal with any potential problems.