Re: [gentoo-user] How to "freeze" my Gentoo system

[Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com>]

Michael Higgins wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:51:05 +0000
> Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:
>
>   
>> On Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:13:30 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>>
>>     
>>>> Could he just not sync and call it a day?  I suspect this is
>>>> going to bite him one day tho.  We know Gentoo likes to be
>>>> updated fairly regular.  I been around Gentoo for years and I
>>>> don't think I would want to do this.  I'm not sure how much
>>>> experience the OP has tho.  
>>>>         
>
> No worries. If I break it, I get to keep the pieces...
>
>   
>>> Michael's been around a while, his name is familiar. He did say he
>>> wants -rN updates so I take that to mean he wants bug fixes and
>>> security updates but everything else to stay that same and
>>> especially no potential ABI/API changes
>>>       
>> One potential problem is ebuilds disappearing from the portage tree as
>> packages are updated, so it would be worth copying everything he uses
>> (or the whole tree) into an overlay.
>>
>>     
>
> Thanks to you both for all the suggestions and caveats... I'll report back when I've done the script to populate package.mask with atoms *pre-*pended by '~'.
>
> As one of you mentioned, it's not an unreasonable thing to want to "freeze" a system, but OTOH Gentoo does like regular updating.
>
> If something drops from the tree, that's okay... My goal is, for packages I've unmasked for the architecture, that they don't keep being updated to the latest available, but eventually come into concordance with 'stable'.
>
> Cheers,
>
>   

Something like this was actually discussed a while back for people with
servers that have to be seriously stable.  I don't think anything ever
came out of it but you may want to check around and see if it did and we
missed it.  I would think Alan would know if it did tho since I think he
maintains a few servers.  Few may be understating it a bit.  ;-) 

I think this could be a good idea for some myself. 

Dale

:-)  :-)