Re: [gentoo-user] I am a "f*****g retard". Can you help me?

[Vaeth]

> I actually have to admit that, apparently, I suffer the same mental
> disability of the poster -that is, I used to believe that using
> --resume-skipfirst was harmless.

In most cases it is harmless (e.g. if you use recompile your whole system
without installing anything new or upgrading anything).
Even in other cases a loop as mentiond on the webpage _can_ be used
safely - but this requires extreme care and/or a lot of knowledge.

The problem is that after failing of a package, portage does
not recalculate the dependencies, i.e. it will attempt to install also
those packages which depend on the failed package. Unfortunately, this
does not mean that the packages depending on this will fail either:
Due to the dubious autotools, they might recognize that the failed
package is not available (if it was a new packages which failed)
and build/install successfully but actually without support for this 
package (although by the intention of the ebuild author and/or according
to your useflags they should support it).

The correct solution to the problem of failing compiles e.g. over night
is the proper implementation of the --keep-going option where these
problems do not arise, because dependencies are recalculated after a
failure.  However, in the absence of this option, the above mentioned
loop was the _only_ available workaround. For the reason explained above
it _might_ give you an inconsistent system (although the chances for this
are not very likely) unless _you_ check/know the dependencies and if in
doubt recompile those packages which were "falsely" successfully installed
after the failed package.
So - as all workarounds - the above mentioned loop had pros and cons
(the pro is of course that, usually, your machine would compile through
the night, and if you are lucky and e.g. only one package fails and you
_know_ that nothing depends on it, you have not wasted the whole night
of compiling).
In the presence of a --keep-going option, it is now fortunately not
necessary anymore to weight the pros and cons. Of course, to insult
somebody just because he weighted the pros and cons differently is beyond
any acceptable limit.