Gregory Woodbury wrote:
Has Alan ever posted his "jackhammer" script for some experts to look at?

I get by really well with a small script that reads the eix outputs, finds the "[U]"
tagged packages, and then runs "emerge -u1" on that list.

Doing anything more than that will be a cause of pain and suffering.

If a package needs patches for something special, it is better to make a local 
repository with modified ebuilds and distfiles, rather than try to force the gentoo repo 
into your own mess. I do this for a few tthings that Gentoo doesn't ship. Portage
is actuallly quite flexible underneath, itt just takes a bit of learning.

-- 
G.Wolfe Woodbury


He did a while back.  Some very experienced Gentoo users here explained to him that his script was the problem.  From memory which isn't all that good, it syncs the tree which is fine.  After that, it gets bad.  I think it did the updates and then repeated that several times within the script.  That is done without him looking to see if anything needs to be changed, USE flags etc, or if something shouldn't be updated at all.  I'm pretty sure that it then deletes all the logs of what was done, which means anything broken is broke and no record of what or even why. 

Yes, some things can be done with a script.  However, there needs to be a point in there where the user, the real brain of what is wanted, looks at the list of what will be updated.  Only a human can look and see if there is USE flag changes or other issues that need a config file to be edited.   Alan skips all that. 

If you want, I can go dig it out and post it.  I should have a copy of the script in my local email.  I keep them for like 2 years or something then it deletes the old stuff.  I'm not sure if you will laugh your head off or cry tho. 

Dale

:-)  :-)