[gentoo-user] Glibc and binpackages

[Laurence Perkins]

I'm not sure if I'm doing something horribly wrong, or missing something blindingly obvious, but I've just had to boot a rescue shell yet again, so I'm going to ask.

To save time and effort, I have my big, powerful machine create binpackages for everything when it updates, and then let all my smaller machines pull from that.  It works pretty well for the most part.

But when there's a glibc update I have to specifically install it first.  If I don't, then about half the time emerge decides that because it doesn't have to worry about build dependencies for binpackages, it can obviously update glibc last...  Then it updates something that's needed for handling updates and that's it, stuck.  If I'm lucky it's a compile tool, not one for handling binpackages and I can just tell it to do the glibc package next.  Quite often though it's something like tar that's fundamental to installing anything at all and I have to ferry the new glibc over on a USB stick and unpack it with busybox...  Occasionally it's something critical for the whole system and then I have to boot to a rescue shell of some kind.

Think it's worth a feature request to have emerge prioritize glibc as high up in the list as it can when installing things?  Or am I the only one who runs into this?

LMP