Re: [gentoo-dev] minimalistic emerge

[Ian Stakenvicius]

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Igor - you need to read the emerge man page.

"emerge -uDNav @world" is the recommended way to update your system,
because then you will stay in sync with all appropriate updates in the
portage tree.  However, if you don't want to do this, just "emerge -u
@world" -- that will only update packages in your world file, and will
only force dependency updates when the new version is required (based
on minimum versions in package dependencies).  And if you only want to
upgrade things piecemeal, then use "--exclude [pkg]" to skip updates,
or "emerge -1 [pkg]" to only update an explicit list, or use
/etc/portage/package.mask to avoid updating to newer versions.

If you're asking for something even lighter than what 'emerge -u
@world' will provide, on an automagic system-wide level, then i think
you'll need to author some detailed specifications as to exactly what
it is you want this new updating feature to do.

Please note, though, that we as Gentoo developers can't guarantee that
your system is going to remain stable if you don't update --deep,
because we can't test every possible combination of every
stable-keyworded dependency version against every package -- not even
a tinderbox makes that particularly feasible, there's just too many
permutations.  I also am not sure at this time if 'emerge -u' would
upgrade dependencies when the version installed was removed from the
portage tree, and this may have multiple adverse effects on your
system long-term depending on why that older version was dropped from
the tree.

So, the recommendation remains that one should update the entire
system via -uDN in order to receive all of the updates available for
your entire dependency tree.

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