[gentoo-desktop] Re: Re: gnucash emerge problem...

[Duncan]

Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. posted <200512132319.29184.bss03@××××××××××.com>,
excerpted below,  on Tue, 13 Dec 2005 23:19:26 -0500:

> On Tuesday 13 December 2005 10:46 pm, maillists wrote:
>> I unmerged gcc. (long story never mind)
>>
>> How do I get out of the corner that I painted myself into?
>
> Get a binary package and install that.  I believe the binary package
> repository at chinstrap.alternating.net is still in operation.

Also note that the stages and/or liveCD should have it available.   I
just confirmed here with the stage-3 686 tarball.  I'd tend to prefer
this, because it's official Gentoo, over something at some random
URL, which might or might not be perfectly fine.

You'd unpack the stage tarball somewhere suitable (preferrably NOT
directly over your running system, that is, NOT to / itself), then chroot
into the new root dir location, and do a /usr/sbin/quickpkg gcc to create
a binary package out of the existing stage installation. Back out of the
chroot, you could then emerge -K
/path/to/unpack/location/usr/portage/package/All/gcc<tab>, the tab (twice
if necessary) to get the specific ebuild file.

That should restore a working gcc, at which point you can remerge your own
version with your own selected USE flags and the like. 

....

After you have recovered, do a man make.conf, and check out
FEATURES=buildpkg.  You can use that to automatically build a binary
package each time you emerge something, so if your toolchain ever gets
broken again, all you have to do is emerge -K the offending package, and
it'll remerge from the binary created at original merge time, without
taking the time to recompile!

Total additional disk space required to store a complete system's worth of
binary packages will be 2-4 gigs.  Note that you'll want to clean out old
versions of packages once in awhile.  There's a tool called eclean that
helps with this, in at least the latest ~arch versions of gentoolkit. tho
I'm not sure it has made its way into stable just yet.

Of course, if you hose portage itself, emerging the binary portage package
becomes rather difficult.  However, for such situations, one can use the
procedure found in $PORTDIR/sys-apps/portage/files/README.RESCUE, only
you'll already have the binary package from when you merged it, so you
be able to skip the suggested download step.  A problem with your
installed python would be similar, since portage requires python to run
correctly.

Using these techniques on a system that has been running FEATURES=buildpkg
for long enough to have binpkg versions of all your critical packages, you
should be able to recover from a problem with any package, as long as you
have a liveCD rescue boot disk handy in case you can't boot.  If you want
to jumpstart the binpkg collection, you can use quickpkg to create a
binary package for anything currently merged.  Naturally, I'd suggest you
start with the packages in the list you get with emerge --pretend
--emptytree system, or if you don't want to do that, at least do gcc,
glibc, binutils, portage, python, etc.  You may also want to preemptively
quickpkg anything that takes quite a while to merge, such as xorg, and
especially OOo, if you have it merged and used the from-source version.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html


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