[gentoo-user] ~amd64 - my experience so far...

[Mark Knecht]

...is not so good actually. Certainly not the way I'd want others to
experience Gentoo.

OK, the ~amd64 upgrade to @system was easy and relatively painless.
The documents were fairly clear. There are things to learn, and old
friends like rc-update and df look different, but it worked and didn't
take long - less than an hour to reboot including editing - so that's
good.

Unfortunately, simply allowing all environments & apps on the system
to go ~amd64 isn't working out as nicely.

1) xfce4 had one build failure. I masked it and the build finished.
xfce starts and seems to mostly work, but I get no wallpaper and the
right click for a menu on the desktop doesn't work. It's usable, but
clearly 'not stable'.

2) gnome-2.28 simply doesn't build.

3) I'm currently left with lots of things in emerge @preserved-rebuild
that don't build. emerge -DuN @world is not clean.

QUESTION: Assume I'm happy with ~amd64 on @system, but want to build
the stable version of gnome or kde. How do I get it? Since gnome-2.26
worked yesterday I tried masking >=gnome-2.28. emerge -DuN gnome.
Portage then didn't try to emerge the meta-package but doesn't take
all of gnome back to 2.26. There's no point trying kde as gnome pulled
in kde components that doesn't build either. Hopefully it's not 'mask
every package in gnome by hand'.

At this point I'm left with a system that's not clean and to me not
terribly useful. Yesterday as stable I built xfce, gnome and kde in
under 4 hours and all 3 worked. Today both gnome and xfce aren't right
and I don't have kde. Probably this is some matter of learning to hold
back portage that I've never done before, rather than unleashing new
packages like you do on a stable system.

How does one accomplish this?

Thanks,
Mark