Re: [gentoo-user] emerge stopped working

[Alan McKinnon]

Apparently, though unproven, at 18:05 on Monday 02 May 2011, Davide Carnovale 
did opine thusly:

> @alan, no error are printed, where and what should i look for in the logs?

It looks awfully like depclean took away your old version of python before you 
used eselect. Others have posted details of how to deal with this.

I'm assuming you are reasonably new to gentoo, here's a tip from someone who 
already got bitten hard too many times to mention:

Some updates require you to take manual action after the fact, and these 
things cannot be automated (at least not without breaking the gentoo 
philosophy of let the user decide always). Ubuntu, Fedora, etc does not have 
this problem as they tell you how things will be, Gentoo is different.

So after an emerge world, *always* go through every log file in 
/var/log/portag/elog[1] and deal with every issue arising before moving onto 
the next step which is usually depclean, emerge @preserved-rebuild and so on.

Some packages should raise alarm bells when they appear in depclean output: 
python, glibc, gcc, portage. Make sure you've done everything you need to have 
done before accepting these choices.

Two final DONTs:

Never blindly accept what depclean says and let it do it's thing. Study the 
output, the warning printed on the screen to do just that is there for a 
reason.

Never blindly update protected config files with etc-update etc. Check each 
one individually and do it manually.




>
> @helmut python just returns to the console, without error or effect of any
> sort, does it means python has get unmerged and that's why emerge doesn't
> work anymore?
>
> 2011/5/2 Helmut Jarausch <jarausch@××××××××××××××××.de>
>
> > On 05/02/2011 05:38:03 PM, Davide Carnovale wrote:
> > > Hi all!
> > > i was going through a world update today and during --depclean emerge
> > > throw
> > > an error complaining about possible corrupted binaries or hw failure.
> > > since then it has stopped working, no matter what i try to emerge,
> > > the
> > > command simply return to the shell without any kind of error or any
> > > other
> > > output at all.
> > > i fired and usb stick with the gentoo 11 live dvd and i copied over
> > > both
> > > bash and emerge binaries to my machine, in case they were corrupted
> > > (bash
> > > was given as the most likely) but nothing changed.
> > > now i simply have no clue on what's wrong and how can i fix it, apart
> > > from a
> > > full reinstall, which i'd like to avoid.
> > >
> > > can anyone point me somewhere to solve this problem?
> >
> > emerge needs Python. Have you tried to invoke Python, just by
> >
> > python
> > import portage
> > quit()
> >
> > Helmut.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com