On 07/01/11 11:25, Duncan wrote:
> Nirbheek Chauhan posted on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 11:26:50 +0530 as excerpted:
> 
>> On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 11:03 AM, Dale <rdalek1967@...> wrote:
>>> William Hubbs wrote:
>>> As a user, if a person hasn't upgraded in about 6 months, they may as
>>> well reinstall anyway.  That is usually the advice given on -user.
>>>  After a year without updating, it is certainly easier and most likely
>>> faster to reinstall.
>>
>> Except for the fact that while you upgrade, you still have a usable
>> system. Reinstallation means a massive time-sink during which your
>> machine is completely unusable. This is not an option for a lot of
>> people.
> 
> This isn't really true.  "Reinstallation" in the sense used here, and in 
> the sense that removing baselayout-1 support would require, can simply 
> mean untarring a new stage-3 tarball over top of an existing system and 
> going from there.
> 
> That gets one a(n) unbroken and updated base on which to rebuild. 

No. Bad Duncan. Stop breaking things badly.
Portage tends to get REALLY confused with that and usually unmerges
glibc or other funnies.

What you want is either using a binhost (like tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org)
or a chroot in which you can build the binpkgs which you can then
install with emerge -K ...

> So keeping an up and running machine even with a reinstall isn't a 
> problem, certainly no more of one than fighting with broken installs, 
> because everything has changed out from under the existing one.

It's not as easy as it could be. We should figure out a reliable way to
move an old install forward ...
(I have some ideas, but it all takes time and lots of testing)

-- 
Patrick Lauer         http://service.gentooexperimental.org

Gentoo Council Member and Evangelist
Part of Gentoo Benchmarks, Forensics, PostgreSQL, KDE herds