Re: [gentoo-user] EAPI packages

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 7:23 AM, hw <hw@×××××.de> wrote:
> Neil Bothwick schrieb:
>>
>> On Sat, 13 Aug 2016 16:08:34 +0200, hw wrote:
>>
>>>   infrequently update Gentoo because I´m *always* running into problems
>>> like this.
>>
>> Every time, or is that just hyperbole?
>
> every time

Keep in mind that your reaction to problems with updates seems to be
to avoid updates and run them less frequently.  However, this is the
sort of thing that is likely to make updates even more complicated to
resolve.

I tend to run most of my updates daily.  Usually I run into no
problems, but occasionally I do (let's say once a month as a guess).
When I do run into a problem there are typically only a few packages
to be updated, so it is fairly obvious where the problems are coming
from.  Usually somebody has already posted on a list or forum about
the issue, or there is a bug.  If I end up fixing it myself it is a
lot easier to ID the issue when only a few packages are in scope.

However, if I ran an update once a year then I'd end up getting a list
of 500 packages to update, and probably about 12 different issues.  I
wouldn't know which of those 500 packages are causing those 12 issues,
and I'd have to fix all 12 before the whole bolus is updated.  I might
also run into circular dep issues since packages would have been
introduced to the tree, become dependencies, then been removed in the
time since my last update.

There are ways to do these kinds of updates but they're going to
require a lot of effort on your part to make them possible.  You'd
probably want to set up your own repo to sync your production servers
from, and serve binary packages to reduce the build-time dependency
load.  Plus, you probably don't want production machines building
packages anyway.

-- 
Rich