[gentoo-user] Update gentoo from live usb?

[gentoo-user] Update gentoo from live usb?

[Andreas Fink]

Hello,

I have a couple of systems that I do not update regularily (some not
even for years). But then sometimes I feel, hey I should do an update.
I have one master build server which builds packages and keeps them as
binary packages, annd all my systems pull the gentoo portage tree from
this master build server, additionally also the configs in /etc/portage
is the same amongst all boxes, i.e. use flags et al are all the same.

Now comes the misery when I want to update an old box, because of
unsupported EAPI and what not. One way that I used in the past was to
extract a stage-3 tarball over the existing root system, and then do
the upgrade, which works to some extent, but it does not seem right.
Coming now to my question: Is it possible to start a live gentoo system
with a recent portage version and then tell portage that it should
install the packages in /mnt/gentoo (which is the real system I care
about). I have heard about the prefix project, but I'm not sure if this
is exactly what I want.
Maybe a second approach would be to get the minimal set of binary
packages from the master build server and extract them manually, such
that I end up with a recent enough portage which supports all EAPIs
that are in the tree. But I have no clue how to get the minimal set of
packages that I would need to extract.

Does anybody have other approaches (besides starting from scratch)?

Re: [gentoo-user] Update gentoo from live usb?

[Michael Jones]

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On Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 01:36 Andreas Fink <finkandreas@web.de> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have a couple of systems that I do not update regularily (some not
> even for years). But then sometimes I feel, hey I should do an update.
> I have one master build server which builds packages and keeps them as
> binary packages, annd all my systems pull the gentoo portage tree from
> this master build server, additionally also the configs in /etc/portage
> is the same amongst all boxes, i.e. use flags et al are all the same.
>
> Now comes the misery when I want to update an old box, because of
> unsupported EAPI and what not. One way that I used in the past was to
> extract a stage-3 tarball over the existing root system, and then do
> the upgrade, which works to some extent, but it does not seem right.
> Coming now to my question: Is it possible to start a live gentoo system
> with a recent portage version and then tell portage that it should
> install the packages in /mnt/gentoo (which is the real system I care
> about). I have heard about the prefix project, but I'm not sure if this
> is exactly what I want.
> Maybe a second approach would be to get the minimal set of binary
> packages from the master build server and extract them manually, such
> that I end up with a recent enough portage which supports all EAPIs
> that are in the tree. But I have no clue how to get the minimal set of
> packages that I would need to extract.
>
> Does anybody have other approaches (besides starting from scratch)?
>


Portage is supposed to offer an upgrade path for any system up to a year
out of date.

If you grab the version of portage from the last upgrade time of the system
being updated plus 6-12 months (however daring you feel like being) you
should be able to upgrade it that much without needing to do a lot of
fiddling.

Repeat until you're updated.


Going forward, you could consider having your build host take a snapshot /
backup of the binpkgs it builds every 3-6 months, with the associated
portage tree, so that you can use those to update your sporadically updated
machines.


I strongly recommend against overwriting your system with a stage3. Any
package that has a changed list of files will leave orphans behind. And
finding them all will be pretty dang hard.


Personally I just make a point to keep my not very large number of machines
updated, but I do it by hand. You might want to look and see if anyone's
written any scripts that automatically update + restart services / reboot
periodically, and email you upon problem

>

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Re: [gentoo-user] Update gentoo from live usb?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Sun, 30 Jan 2022 02:24:32 -0600, Michael Jones wrote:

> I strongly recommend against overwriting your system with a stage3. Any
> package that has a changed list of files will leave orphans behind. And
> finding them all will be pretty dang hard.

You can find orphan files with qfile, details are in the man page, but I
agree with you that it is not to be recommended.

Of course, creating difficulty with future updates is only one of the
risks of not updating - running with unfixed bugs and security
vulnerabilites are also good reasons to not do this.

I'd say you should update at least every three months, and keep an eye on
the output from glsa-check to make sure you are not unnecessarily
vulnerable.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

He's so cool, he could get frostbite from masturbating.

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Re: [gentoo-user] Update gentoo from live usb?

[Andreas Fink]

On Sun, 30 Jan 2022 02:24:32 -0600
Michael Jones <gentoo@jonesmz.com> wrote:

> Going forward, you could consider having your build host take a snapshot /
> backup of the binpkgs it builds every 3-6 months, with the associated
> portage tree, so that you can use those to update your sporadically updated
> machines.

Yes, for the future I'm going to take snapshots of the binpkgs+portage.
But the first update will not profit from this idea, since they have
not been updated for quite some time now.
But thanks for the idea to save me some headache in the future :)

Re: [gentoo-user] Update gentoo from live usb?

[Wol]

On 30/01/2022 17:03, Andreas Fink wrote:
> On Sun, 30 Jan 2022 02:24:32 -0600
> Michael Jones <gentoo@jonesmz.com> wrote:
> 
>> Going forward, you could consider having your build host take a snapshot /
>> backup of the binpkgs it builds every 3-6 months, with the associated
>> portage tree, so that you can use those to update your sporadically updated
>> machines.
> 
> Yes, for the future I'm going to take snapshots of the binpkgs+portage.
> But the first update will not profit from this idea, since they have
> not been updated for quite some time now.
> But thanks for the idea to save me some headache in the future :)
> 
Can you create an LVM volume and just store snapshots in that?

The other thing you might be able to do if you're planning to go through 
several iterations to get up to date, is for the intermediate steps just 
update @system.  So long as that works, you should have a working system 
at all points, and just update @world at the last minute.

Cheers,
Wol