Re: [gentoo-user] Anyone else's Gentoo unruly lately?

[Philip Webb]

080628 Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Jun 2008 02:53:53 -0400, Philip Webb wrote:
>> 'emerge world' is the source of many problems regularly reported here.
> No, it's changing package versions that breaks a working system,
> whether this is a result of running 'emerge world'
> or updating the guilty package individually is irrelevant.

No, the problem with 'emerge world' (without '-p') is
that the user hands over control of his machine to an unreliable automaton,
which can do all sorts of damage while he's drinking coffee etc;
if you emerge pkgs individually, you decide exactly what's going on & watch.

> Bear in mind that every distro, and just about every OS,
> has the equivalent of 'emerge -u world'.

Gentoo is not just another distro: if you're willing to rely on others,
why not use Ubuntu, Mandriva etc or buy a Mac ?
the attraction of Gentoo is that it gives you as much control as you want
over what is installed in your box & when & how: you make your own mistakes.
'emerge world' goes back to the early days of the distro
& was AFAIK copied from FreeBSD; the idea has never been revisited.

080628 Alan McKinnon wrote:
> Do you mean 'emerge world <enter>'
> as opposed to the much more sensible 'emerge -p world' ...

Yes, of course: I said I myself use 'emerge -Dup world' to get the order.

> ... examine output for problems, consider each update,
> examine USE flag changes for impact, resolve problems
> and then and only then run 'emerge world' ?

'eix-sync' & its colored output does enough of that for me.

> your manually maintained log is entirely redundant if you emerge Genlop

How so ? -- the site given by 'eix genlop' simply goes on re Perl.

> and by telling portage to log to disk there is no real need
> to sit glued to the screen watching console output anymore.

I know: I have  280 MB  in  /var/log/emerge-logs  (wry smile).

Anyway, I've just done my weekly update.  There were  4  pkgs to process
-- eselect-ctags fetchmail autoconf shared-mime-info -- & also  eix ,
which has a new version in testing (safe enough for eix).
Of course, I make use of Konsole tabs to facilitate eix & emerge,
update 'pkg.ref' with Gvim running on another KDE desktop
& use Klipper to copy info between Konsole & Gvim.

I've been doing it this way for nearly 8 years
& have never run into a serious problem: HTH one or two others (smile).

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