Re: [gentoo-amd64] backups and world updates

[Matt Randolph]

Mark wrote:

>Thanks to everyone who helped me get my system back after a couple of
>world update snafus. Now of course I'm a little gun-shy about using
>options like emerge --update world. So what's my best bet to keep my
>system up to date, while protecting it from my own lack of
>understanding of updating config files?
>
>Here's what I'm intending to do so far:
>
>1. Prior to running any large system update, back up /etc to another location
>2. use dispatch-conf instead of etc-update
>
>Can anyone make any other suggestions? Which emerge options are best
>for full system updates? Thanks
>
>
dispatch-conf is probably the single biggest change you can make to 
reduce the chance of future borking (etc-update is bad news; stay away 
from it).  If the diff from dispatch-conf shows nothing but gobbledygook 
before and after, then it's very likely you should simply use the new 
version.

One thing you might do is add a comment whenever you make changes to a 
configuration file by hand:

# added by Mark 7-28-05
foo="bar"

Then the diff will show you clearly that you need to merge the files.  
Obviously, this won't work if the manual change was made through some 
utility.  But then, you can probably just use that utility again to 
re-make the changes.

One other thing I strongly recommend is that you clean up your world 
file.  You really should have only the bare minimum number of packages 
in the world file to avoid problems like circular dependencies.  I 
remember once, long ago, I had both kdebase AND the kde-meta packages in 
my world file (don't ask me how).  I couldn't upgrade much of anything 
kde related until I cleared that up.  Everything was blocking everything 
else.

Use the dep script to clean up your world file.  It's located here:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=907101

The one thing I would add about the dep script is that you still need to 
use your head when it comes to listening to it's recommendations.  dep 
told me to remove quake3 because I had quake3-wop (which depends on 
quake3) and, thus, quake3 was redundant.  I have decided to keep both 
packages in my world file because I may choose to unmerge the quake3-wop 
mod, but I'd probably still want to have quake3 installed.

Other than in cases like that, I strongly suggest you listen to what dep 
tells you and consider making the recommended changes to your world file 
(and copy world to [.]world.bak before you make any changes, of course).

I do an "emerge -Dup world" every day right after I "glsa-check."  I do 
a "revdep-rebuild -p" whenever I wind up upgrading more than a few packages.

If things go wrong during an emerge world, I have found it useful to 
emerge --metadata before resuming.  Also, delete 
/root/.revdep-rebuild*.?_* if revdep-rebuild is acting strange.  Then 
just try again.

Also, bear in mind that revdep-rebuild doesn't work properly with binary 
packages like mozilla-firefox-bin and openoffice-bin.  I always do a 
"revdep-rebuild -p" and then emerge the broken packages by hand.

Oh, and remember to use the --oneshot flag when you're emerging a single 
package to fix a dependency.  Otherwise, you'll wind up with redundant 
entries in your world file again.  You'll have to keep your wits about 
you here again to decided whether a given package belongs in your world 
file or not.

-- 
"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" - W. of O.

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