[gentoo-user] anti-portage wreckage?

[Mike Myers]

Hi!  I know I don't post here much but I read it a lot and have been using
Gentoo for several years now.  I keep seeing users mention about how they do
an update and then everything goes to crap.  I've experienced this myself
quite a bit too.  I believe the reason this happens is the drawback one of
Gentoo's nicest features; constantly being up to date.

In contrast to Gentoo, most distros have a new version released every year
or so which includes major updates like new kernels, sound drivers, updated
software, etc.  In Gentoo, the system is updated while you are using it.
This causes us users to modify whatever we're running to suit all these
changes.  Take for instance some recent packages that have had updates, like
PHP, mysql, and apache.  All three of these have had major updates at almost
the exact same time.  And then on the desktop side, we've had to deal with
the whole xorg going modular thing and other similar updates, also at the
same time.  This can be quite a headache on a live system, especially when
you have multiple systems.  Like, it's easier to mask the new versions and
just stick with the minor updates (like mysql 4.0.x, instead of going from
4.0 to 4.1 or 5), but this also leaves the users with having to manage all
of these masks for multiple systems.

Anyways, my question is that since we have profiles, like 2006.1 currently,
why can't we do something like restrict versions of apps to specific
profiles?  I'd rather be able to specify that I'm using like the 2005
profile, and then when I try to do emerge -u world, I don't have to deal
with my applications going from one major version to another major version
all by themselves and then breaking with no easy way to revert back.  This
is pretty much similar to how Red Hat works with up2date.  That way the
community wouldn't have to worry about dealing with older installs since
they could drop support for them after a while.  Also, us users can miss a
month or so of updates and not have to worry about updating 500 config files
only to realize the new version of mysql just broke like 20 other
applications and won't even start because it's using the old config.

Please tell me there's some solution to this?  I haven't seen one mentioned
anywhere yet.  Even with Gentoo's occasional problems, I like it too much to
use any other distro but I'd definitely like to see better version
management than what its got, which is none.