Re: [gentoo-dev] i have an idea ! (erescue)

[Tom Wesley]

On Sun, 2005-05-15 at 17:18 -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> one advantage that other binary based package managers have over Gentoo is
> ease of recovery from broken core packages ... break your gcc ?  no problem !
> simply do `apt-get install gcc` or `rpm -i gcc` or whatever
>
> my proposal is to implement a new utility (called 'erescue' for lack of a
> better name) that is written in C and designed to be statically linked ...
> then next time you break a core system package which cannot be recovered by
> simply running `emerge` a few times, you run `erescue <broken package>`
>
> for example, when i broke binutils in unstable with a gcc4 patch, i noticed
> that it's hard for users to *easily* recover from this ... we developers end
> up scrambling to build a bunch of binary packages for a variety of compatible
> compiler/libc combinations so the user can just wget the file and run `emerge
> binutils.tbz2` and be on their way
>
> the packages that would be eligible for an 'erescue' package would be just
> about everything when you do `USE=-* emerge system -ep` ... i'm sure we can
> trim many of those out though :)  maybe even create a new USE flag for some
> of these core packages so that we can trim out more files
>
> the idea would be to create very bare min packages so that the user can simply
> 'rescue' themselves ... after that, they it's up to them to re-emerge the
> package to apply all their fun ricer-optimizations as they see fit
>
> i dont think it'd be too hard to integrate this 'rescue set' into a catalyst
> target so that it'll become part of our normal release schedule of stage
> tarballs
> -mike

This would really help me at work, as I generally have to partimage my
workstation PC before updates that might break stuff.

I nominate "ecockup-reverse" as the name.

-- 
Tom Wesley <tom@×××××.org>