On Sat, 2010-09-11 at 23:13 +0000, Duncan wrote:
> If you don't have time for reading those, you don't have time for the 
> update, because you can't consider it done until you do, and follow thru, 
> and failing to do so is risking spending a lot MORE time figuring out what 
> broke and how to fix it, when things inevitably DO break, because the 
> followups weren't done.  As I said, skipping the warnings, it's not a 
> question of if, but when, and just how bad the breakage is going to be and 
> how long it'll take to figure out and resolve the problem, so skipping 
> them really is NOT a viable option.

Duncan, you're a good man, and have helped me before.  I have 14 news
items on this box, of which I've only read 1.  None of them deal with
libata and the switch in the kernel from PATA drivers to SATA with the
change of device names, etc. required to support this.

> I wish there were some way to really drum this into every Gentoo user's 
> head when they started, so they never ended up having to learn it the hard 
> way, as you did.  But as they say, if wishes were fishes...

You know, I set up my Gentoo boxes - 2 commercial servers and a desktop
box - over 5 years ago.  Gentoo was a lot simpler then.  There were no
eselect news items to read because there was no eselect news.  There was
also no decent system to read the emerge notes, so Eldad Zack and I
wrote one.  I've had to learn a lot of stuff "the hard way" but as the
years go by I have less and less patience with having to get under the
hood and tinker.  I'm kinda stuck with what I have.  My servers are
running mysql 5.0.  If I took them off line to upgrade everything to
mysql 5.1, every system on the boxes on which my customers depend would
break - mail service, DNS, SpamAssassin, billing, to mention a few, and
these would be down for who knows how long.  I'm almost 70 years old.
I'll probably sell my business and let someone else worry about this
crap before I get everything truly up-to-date.

As far as the desktop system goes, I'll probably build a 2nd box, maybe
running another distribution, and migrate stuff to it incrementally.  My
time and my sanity have value, and doing this may be less costly, in the
long run, than trying to hack this 5-year old box and being without a
desktop (and my company's billing system, and my email, and my web
development tools, etc. etc.) until I get it figured out.

Enough of this geezer-rant.  Peace and love to everyone in these crazy
times.  I mean it!  

-- 
Lindsay Haisley       | "Never expect the people who caused a problem
FMP Computer Services |  to solve it." - Albert Einstein
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