On 2023-06-12, Wol <antlists@youngman.org.uk> wrote:
> On 09/06/2023 21:16, Grant Edwards wrote:
>> On 2023-06-09, Daniel Pielmeier <billie@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>
>>> If it is only about gemato then temporary disable the rsync-verify flag
>>> which pulls it in.
>>>
>>> # USE="-rsync-verify" emerge sys-apps/portage
>>
>> The problem I ran into is that you never know how many issues there
>> are standing in the way of upgrading. The one time I decided to muscle
>> my way through updating an "obsolete" Gentoo install, [...]
>>
>> You do learn alot about how portage/emerge works...
>>
> Learning that is a good idea maybe :-)
>
> But last time I had a well-out-of-date system, it was a long and
> messy process ...
>
> What I did was, every time portage said "giving up" or "conflict found"
> or whatever, I just took a note of as many of the packages I could
> remember that portage said it could emerge, and then manually updated
> them "emerge --update --one-shot".
>
> And any conflicts, if I dared, I simply deleted then "emerge -C --one-shot".
IIRC, at one point Python was one of those problems, and I stupidly
removed Python before realizing what that meant...
Hilarity ensued.
Removing/skipping as many of the non-essential "big" packages and
their dependancies and getting the base system updated is indeed the
best way to go.
I second this approach. When rescuing a Gentoo system, my first step would be to deselect any and every non-critical package from @world, then try to get @system updated through any means necessary. In the past, I've removed packages instead of deselecting them, but I've had cases where depclean refused to do anything because there were already dependency problems, and sometimes it's hard to know what's safe to unmerge with "-C".