Re: [gentoo-user] time for an emerge -e world?

[Helmut Jarausch]

On 11/24/10 17:03:34, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> Apparently, though unproven, at 17:48 on Wednesday 24 November 2010,
> Kevin
> O'Gorman did opine thusly:
>
> > On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 12:17 PM, Alan McKinnon
> <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com>wrote:
> > > Apparently, though unproven, at 20:54 on Friday 19 November 2010,
> Allan
> > >
> > > Gottlieb did opine thusly:
> > > > >    It seems, however, that you're still going down the path
> of
> emerge
> > > > >
> > > > > -e @world. Why is that? If it's just to be confident that
> everything
> > > > > is back to the way it should be then I understand that. I've
> done it
> > > > > myself many times in the last 12 years.
> > > >
> > > > Yes that is the reason.
> > >
> > > Sounds like the big guns approach, can be valid at times.
> > >
> > > I'm usually the first one to chip in about emerge -e world being
> stupid
> > > when
> > > someone reads the gcc upgrade guide, but sometimes you have a box
> that
> > > just will not fix itself despite hours of troubleshooting. In a
> case
> > > like this a full remerge often fixes mysterious but actual real
> > > problems.
> >
> > I've had pretty much the same thing happen.  In my case, 'eix'
> showed that
> > I had 0.9.8p and 1.0.0 installed
> > in two different slots.   However the 3 files that belong to 0.9.8
> were
> > missing.  Fortunately, I run with --buildpkg
> > so I had a binary package lying around.  Emerging it with -gK
> restored the
> > files, and everything was okay.
> >
> > OTOH, a couple of years ago I did an emerge -e and regretted it.
> It
> kept
> > stopping because something wasn't
> > configured right, and I had to go through dispatch-conf on
> everything up to
> > that point before I could get it to
> > proceed.  Good luck with your "few days".  Mine was more like 2
> weeks of
> > stop-and-go.
>
>
> Ah, the joys of source-based distros :-)
>
> If you break it, you get to keep all 47,392 pieces!
> I keep promising to leave gentoo behind and find something less
> thrilling.
> Then I use by Ubuntu netbook for a few days and come right back.
>
> It's like a heroin junkie needing his fix...
>

I have been doing  emerge -e world just recently.
The first few days I felt like a disc jockey, here a use flag in
there out.
But then the real problem was that Gentoo is changing quite fast.
All packages which failed to rebuild couldn't be rebuilt on an up-to-
date machine either, since meanwhile I have installed a newer version 
sys-devel/autoconf and friends and some packages cannot be rebuilt with
a recent version of these tools. I just didn't notice it on my master
machine since there was no need to rebuild these packages. But trying 
to do so now revealed the true cause of the error -> some bug reports.

Helmut.