Re: [gentoo-user] Re: how to recover a portage that wasn't in use for very long time

[Stroller <stroller@stellar.eclipse.co.uk>]

On 13 May 2009, at 15:27, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> ...
> It's just that I remember all too well what it took to get through  
> those many
> various blockers. More often than not I was once of the first to run  
> into them
> - I sync and update daily - but I'd hate to do it all again all in  
> one go,
> especially when all my buddies here have forgotten the procedure.

I think it does help if one upgrades a week or two after everyone  
else. I upgrade my main systems only every 4 - 12 weeks, and whenever  
I have a problem I look in the list archives and a clear upgrade  
procedure has most always been described.

I upgraded a 2007 system to current only a few weeks ago, and I  
encountered ALL the portage, mktemp, com_err, util-linux & sys-libs/ss  
problems. Honestly, it was not so bad. All these problems were clearly  
documented on the list - perhaps by yourself! - and I was able to  
overcome all of them in the course of an afternoon. The system was  
down for a couple of hours because I was hasty & impatient at one  
point, but in my case the significant cause of delays was that the  
machine is an old Duron 800mhz & took time with its compilation. With  
a faster machine I could perhaps have done all these upgrades within  
an hour.

Grabbing old versions of ebuilds from the attic is a bit of a pain,  
you wget them, rename them, copy them into /usr/local/portage, create  
the manifest and it's only when you try to emerge them that you find  
you also need a .patch file. But all these blockers are overcome just  
by upgrading the various packages in a straight-forward order.

I reread Alexey's post after replying to yours, and the reason he's  
having problems is because he's being careless. If you break the  
system, it's obviously a gamble whether you'll get your ass out of the  
problem you created for yourself. If you want to be sure of not  
breaking the system then you have to be cautious, resolve EACH and  
EVERY dependency in turn and not just go "fukkit, i don't know what  
that package does so, i'll ignore or unmerge it, upgrade this other  
package to the latest version and hope everything resolves".

Stroller.