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Pacho Ramos posted on Tue, 20 Sep 2011 15:09:01 +0200 as excerpted: |
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> I haven't ever tried it but, what would occur if that people with really |
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> updated systems simply unpack an updated stage3 tarball in their / and, |
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> later, try to update? |
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I believe it was Mike that pointed me at the error in that, which once he |
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mentioned it I recognized it due to having to recover from the same |
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problem but for a different reason.[1] |
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The problem is that since the stage-3 untarring bypasses portage, the |
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files on the live filesystem no longer match what portage believes to be |
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installed. The filesystem right after the untarring should be functional |
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to at minimum the level of the stage tarball, but as soon as one starts |
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emerging new packages, there will be issues since the old versions won't |
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be properly removed, because the files no longer match what's in the |
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database. |
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FEATURES=unmerge-orphans is a dramatic help cleaning up the mess (it |
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wasn't around when I had the problem for other reasons, unfortunately), |
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but I don't believe it can or will catch everything. |
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There's definitely a stage-3 tarball method that works and is actually |
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the recommended method for updating real old installations, but it |
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involves using a chroot and effectively installing from scratch in the |
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chroot, then booting to it instead of the existing installation. That's |
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basically a special-case of case #5 in the Gentoo Linux Alternative |
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Installation HOWTO, installing Gentoo from an existing Linux distro[2]. |
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The only bit of note is that the existing distro happens to be (an |
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outdated) Gentoo as well, instead of whatever other distro. |
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[1] My situation was separate /, /usr and /var partitions, each with |
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backups, but ending up in a recovery situation where the backups weren't |
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in sync time-wise. Thus portage's package installation database on /var |
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was out of sync with the actual files on / and /usr. I was still finding |
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the occasional stale file triggering issues, over a year later! It's for |
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this reason that by personal policy, everything portage installs to is on |
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the same partition, along with the installed package database, so if I |
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end up using a backup of that partition, the database is by definition in |
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sync with what's installed since it's all the same backup partition. |
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[2] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/altinstall.xml#doc_chap5 |
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I used this HOWTO from Mandrake back in 2004, for my original |
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Gentoo/~amd64 install. For that matter, the gentoo/amd64 32-bit chroot |
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guide is a variant on this idea as well, except that for just a 32-bit |
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chroot, the host-system kernel and services can be used, so they don't |
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need built. But I did a variant on /that/ for my netbook build image, |
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located on my main machine since it's far more powerful than the netbook, |
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and of course I built the kernel and system services for it, tho I only |
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actually ran them after installing them to the netbook. |
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-- |
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Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. |
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"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- |
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and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman |
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