Re: [gentoo-user] Bisect a problem going back months?

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 11:49 AM, Paul Hartman
<paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 9:38 AM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm wondering if there is a Gentoo way to bisect a bug that's crept
>> into my 64-bit Intel-based system (Intel process, motherboard and
>> graphics) over the last few months. Fundamentally when this bug
>> appears it generates a complete X crash back to the gdm login. My
>> suspicion is that it's related to the Gentoo push to use firefox-bin
>> and 32-bit Flash until some security issues were addressed but I don't
>> know that for sure.
>>
>> Are there specific overlays I'd want to add using layman that would
>> allow me to get back to earlier versions of the Intel graphics driver,
>> 64-bit Firefox and the now masked versions of Flash I was using say
>> 2-3 months ago? At this point I don't know for sure that what I need
>> isn't in portage and just masked. I'll start reviewing that this
>> evening. This post was primarily just to figure out what my options
>> might be.
>>
>> I've never used sunrise or sunset, etc. Maybe it's as easy as adding
>> one of those to layman and then bisecting my way through some
>> experiments to figure out where the problem first appeared?
>
> You can get old ebuilds from http://sources.gentoo.org, and maybe take
> whole portage tree snapshot from a given point in time (never tried
> it). Or maybe there are portage webrsync snapshots going back (again,
> never used them).
>
> If you have demerge installed it should have taken snapshots of which
> packages you had installed at each time you ran emerge as well. I
> think that'll still depend on those old versions still being in the
> tree, which for security fixes etc they usually are not kept, but all
> should be on http://sources.gentoo.org
>

Thanks Paul. This is something to look at.

It seems at first glance it's roughly equivalent to what's on my
system right now. For instance concerning adobe-flash I see only one
small difference - the oldest 9.0.159 version differs shows up in eix
on the machine but isn't at sources.gentoo.org. That's not bad.

I believe you are right that I could probably somehow figure out by
hand using /var/log/emerge.log what was installed after a certain
date, or possibly figure out what version was running at a certain
date. I wonder if there are any tools for figuring out the installed
versions back in time. I don't save anything other than emerge.log and
I don't know for sure than an old rev of that file was thrown away at
some point and the file started over again. I suspect many ebuilds
that I've used are no longer in sources.gentoo.org as almost certainly
I used Flash 4.0, Flash 5.0, etc. sometime along time ago.

Thanks for the pointer.

Cheers,
Mark
What about really old