Re: [gentoo-user] Can anyone tell me?

[Dan Farrell]

On Sun, 02 Mar 2008 12:03:44 -0500
Chris Walters <cjw2004d@×××××××.net> wrote:

> I find these paragraphs to be rude and insulting.  I am not an idiot
> - I know exactly what "testing" means, and what "unstable" means.
> Just because I ask a relatively simple question in this group does
> not mean that I am "not prepared to deal with the occasional
> problem".  Were that the case, I would not be working with computers
> at all, since all operating systems and distributions have an
> "occasional problem" even in their "stable" branches.
>
> Chris

If I may speak for Neil, he provides a lot of very useful information
to the list and is a very courteous poster as well.  In my mind, that
little lemming that somehow appears along with his emails is
the sign of a good addition to the thread.  I'm sure he didn't
mean to insult you. I hope that you agree that even though you started
the thread, the information he gave could be useful to others reading
it. I thought it was an informative and well-written post myself, not
that yours aren't, but don't be too defensive.  We're all here to learn
(and perhaps to teach, occasionally at least ;) )

to answer your original question succinctly: 

> Can anyone tell me what packages you know of that will break your
> system if you choose to put "ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~amd64" in your make.conf
> file?

no, no one can tell until they are tested, and then they will be marked
stable.  

If I may take a moment to make a few (friendly and respectful!)
criticisms of your post, that may have given people the wrong
impression, I think there are probably two things that may have done
so:  firstly, your subject line was 'Can anyone help me?'  Sure, you're
asking for help, but a more relevant subject line would have nicely
synopsized your post.  Most people that start a thread here _are_
looking for help, after all.  Secondly, I think this: 

>I do know that the only way to fix the problem was to restore from
>backup, or to try re-installing again.  I just want to know which
>packages are so unstable that I should mask them.

definitely made my blood boil a little.  It sounds as if, with your gawk case
here, a careful analysis of the log files could have perhaps provided
you with a few fundamentals from /usr/lib that were missing and only
needed to be copied over to / before /usr or /usr/lib was mounted from
it's seperate filesystem.  (I am just guessing that's how Neil solved
this particular problem, although I wouldn't know.)  Saying that the
only way to fix a particular problem is by replacing the software with
a working version is very rarely the case.  

I hope you can understand how that could give us a little bit of a bad
first impression here on the lists, because it consists of a lot of
serious gentooers that all seem to share a dislike of reinstalls and
backup restorations rather than responding to particular error messages
and resolving their problems that way.  Perhaps it's just the gentoo
way - reinstalling seems to be very popular in ubuntu.  

Anyhow, my advice to you is to do what many, including myself do - save
yourself the headache of running ~amd64, and only use package.keywords
to unmask packages as necessary.  

Good luck, and may you withhold judgment of me as I have of you, 

		Dan Farrell
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