Re: [gentoo-user] emerge --update behavior

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jan 1, 2012 at 3:07 PM, Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
> On 01/01/2012 05:40 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:
>>
>>
>> I'm not clear. Why does one ever bother with emerge -u package? In 10
>> years of Gentoo I've managed to get by with basically either emerge
>> package to add something or emerge -DuN @world to stay updated. (or
>> @system in the old days but no longer...)
>
>
> Usually it's because a world update wants to do both trivial version bumps
> and replace major software at the same time. I can't take a server down for
> an hour in the middle of the day to update Apache, but I can bump
> timezone-data, sure.
>
> Even when there aren't any major packages, sometimes I'll do the smaller
> ones in chunks, so that if something breaks I don't have to revert 300
> packages.
>
>
>
>> Not picking on anyone but in my mind emerge -u package _should_ add
>> the package to the world file because any time I run emerge with a
>> package name and without -1 I'm telling it to make it part of @world.
>> If it's not part of @world, and is already on the machine, then emerge
>> -DuN @world is the right way to get it and everything else updated.
>
>
> No offense taken, that's why I asked. I can almost never get away with a
> full world update except on my personal machines, so the way --update works
> is important to me.
>
> Adding unwanted packages to world is especially bad because there are things
> like amavisd-new that have undeclared (optional?) dependencies on
> miscellaneous perl packages. After a few months, I don't remember which perl
> packages I wanted vs. which ones portage stuck in there by accident, so the
> world file just grows and grows.
>
> Adding --oneshot to the default opts is probably the way to go when I'm
> ready to concede that I'll forget -1 occasionally. It feels dirty, though.
>

OK, makes sense to me.

1) I only do home machines. My family all over California now runs
Gentoo and has for years. Windows no longer exists anywhere except in
VMs. Clearly I can see why someone running production machines
wouldn't want to do that.

2) I forget the -1 sometimes when I do an individual package update.
However I generally remember to go back and hand edit the world file
once a quarter or so and remove anything that isn't a real
application, etc.

Glad I wasn't sounding too negative. It wasn't my intention.

Cheers,
Mark