Re: [gentoo-user] Update or Install again? Testing vs. stable?

["Richard Fish" <bigfish@asmallpond.org>]

On 9/13/06, Alan E. Davis <lngndvs@gmail.com> wrote:
> It took a tremendous amount of time, months, to setup all of these
> packages; maintenance of the system also demands not only a fast
> network connection, but also a lot of time.  It's not going to be easy
> to reinstall this system in it's current form.  Perhaps it's
> necessary, however.

I think at this point you have two options:

1. Reinstall the system using the curernt 2006.1 AMD media.

Advantages:
- you can use the GRP binary packages to do a quick update.
- you avoid recompiling everything for the gcc update
- updating to current should be a fairly small change

Disadvantages:
- You need to be sure to backup your configuration files, or you may
lose something that took a long time to get right.
- If you have/make a lot of changes to USE, you may have a lot of
things that need to be rebuilt after you are "done" with the install.

If you do this, be sure to backup your configuration files, especially
/etc/portage, /etc/make.conf.  Plus you probably want to keep
/var/lib/portage/world as well.

2. Remove ~amd64 from keywords, and basically follow the gcc upgrade
guide, since you probably need to udpate to gcc 4.1 anyway.

Advantages:
- It's relatively easy to see what things are going to be downgraded,
so you can decide what needs to be added to package.keywords.
- Your configuration files will be protected by CONFIG_PROTECT.

Disadvantages:
- You end up doing an emerge -e world, which is going to take quite a
while to execute.


>From a general perspective on running some ~arch packages on an
otherwise stable system, how successful that is usually depends on how
many ~arch packages you have.  ~arch packages tend to depend on other
~arch things, so there is a viral effect that leads some people to
give up and use ~arch for the entire system.  Using the
~cate-gory/package-ver.s.ion syntax can help here, as it only allows
the ~arch keyword for specific versions or -r releases.

HTH,
-Richard
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