[gentoo-desktop] Re: Problem Emerging Gnome3 on Fresh Install

[Duncan]

marduk posted on Thu, 17 Oct 2013 12:44:21 -0400 as excerpted:

> Doing everything at once (IMO) is just a recipe for headaches.  The best
> thing is to do smaller steps, verify, then move to the next step.  Sure
> you can do everything in one step, but when there is a problem it will
> be more difficult to figure out which change created which problem (was
> it switching to testing? switching to systemd? etc.).

FWIW as a kde user not a gnomie, but with a decade on gentoo early next 
year, I'll heartily endorse that recommendation!  All sorts of stuff is 
possible on gentoo and it's more flexible than most binary distro users 
could begin to imagine, but by the same token major changes can and do 
occasionally get quite complex, and taking it a step at a time and 
bringing the system to a consistent state (or as consistent as possible, 
sometimes you break the consistent steps down into smaller steps too, and 
only make sure the individual area you're working on is consistent for 
that sub-step) at each step is /the/ way to success.

The same general policy applies once you're all current, if you then 
slack off for a year and don't do updates, then try to get current 
again.  I do updates on my main machine generally weekly if not more 
often, but I sometimes go a year or more between netbook updates[1], 
which means there's almost certain to be blockers when I try to update 
everything at once, but by breaking the big update into smaller 
intermediate steps and just updating what I can at each step, I resolve 
them one by one until there's no blockers remaining and I'm fully updated 
once again.

---
[1] I deliberately don't keep anything personal but the user passwords 
themselves on the netbook, and contrary to what the name netbook implies, 
I don't actually have wifi setup or do much networking other than behind 
the local firewall with it, so otherwise vital security updates aren't a 
big deal as exposure is very limited.

-- 
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