[gentoo-dev] Re: Reminder: please use the latest Portage/repoman version to commit to tree

[Duncan]

Andreas K. Huettel posted on Thu, 30 Sep 2010 09:36:44 +0200 as excerpted:

> as I've only recently "graduated to developer", I've got a question
> about this. Diego, your request makes perfect sense to me. But, so far I
> always thought "Python, portage, and gcc are the things that I really
> need to rely on, so whatever I do, I'll keep those stable."
>
> (My development machine(s) are also my real-life work machines.)

The main topic is portage, here, but since you brought up the bigger 
question...

1) For gcc, keep in mind that it's both slotted and easy to change running 
versions using gcc-config.  I run ~arch here, not stable, but take 
advantage of the slotting to test out still hard-masked versions before 
~arch gets them.  

The caveat is C++, due to libstdc++ being part of gcc, so if you're 
running anything like KDE that has really complex dependencies and is C++, 
you'll probably want to switch that all at once, to avoid issues like I've 
had before with some parts of it not building with the new gcc, but cmake 
being built with the new gcc, so they won't build with the old one 
either.  (FWIW, I've been running 100% gcc 4.5 for a few months, no probs 
at all, due to flameeyes tinderbox work! =:^)  YMMV of course.)

2) If you don't think glibc is vital enough for that list, you've never 
had it break!  (Again, I run full ~arch, and remember once when glibc's 
symlinks got broken.  It was "interesting" but I was able to recover 
without going to my recovery partition.)  Bash can be vital as well, tho 
if you have another shell it's not /so/ bad.

-- 
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