Re: [gentoo-user] Upgrading to gcc 4.1: emerge -e world required?

[Richard Fish]

On 5/27/06, Alexander Skwar <listen@×××××××××××××××.name> wrote:
> > Stop using ~arch packages, or stop whining.
>
> No, I won't do neither. The GWN and the upgrade doc used to say,
> that an upgrade is (basically) riskless.

Well I can't force you to do anything.  You found a problem, reported
a bug, and got the documentation fixed.  Great, all useful
contributions to a community supported distribution.

However you have also attacked the Gentoo devs.  You have insinuated
that they are lazy and/or careless.  You do remember that Gentoo devs
are unpaid volunteers doing this in their spare time, right?  And this
is how you choose to thank them for that gift?

> That's wrong - as it has been confirmed and corrected now. If that
> warning would have been there in the gcc-upgrade doc, everything
> would have been fine.

And it will be when gcc 4.1.1 goes out of ~arch, so the stable users
will know they need to do an emerge -e world.  Yeah for them!

> Bullshit.

My thoughts exactly...

> I'd expect them to do testing and not give so bold statements
> as "The upgrade should be incredibly easy and require no additional
> work to install and use. " without making VERY sure, that this
> is actually true.

They added it to ~arch to make VERY sure that this was true, and it wasn't.

> And what's also irritating are so many small errors, like files
> with non-matching filesizes/checksums in the digests.

The filesize issue is probably because the distfile changed without an
change in the ebuild version.  So you can get a new Manifest (from
emerge --sync) that doesn't match the actual distfile you have, and
get a filesize mismatch the next time you try to merge that same
version, e.g. when doing an emerge -e world.  This is rare, but it
does happen.

The evidence that this is in any way related to the gcc upgrade is
pretty thin...

> > I just upgraded to gcc-4.1 and pruned 3.4.6, and KDE, koffice, OOo,
> > and mozilla all still load and run fine.
>
> Did you yet re-compile Qt 3 and Qt 4? No?

For the sake of argument, I just did.  Guess what?  The only "bad"
thing that happened is my KDE theme went away.  No big deal, I've seen
it before when upgrading qt, and although I'm not sure what causes it,
I know that remerging kdelibs fixes it.

But of course this is meaningless...the fact that some people have no
problems doesn't change the fact that some do.

> Then you're experiences just don't count. KDE broke on my
> system, when I recompiled Qt. Before the recompile, KDE was fine.
> As I've wrote in lengths on the bug report. Seems you've not read
> it - why not? Why am I writing reports and *also* post links
> here?

I *did*.  And it was very good and useful report, even though it was a
duplicate of another report.

Look, I am not claiming there the gcc upgrade is seamless and easy.  I
am also *not* suggesting that the fact that it works on my system is
proof that there are no problems.  But it does mean that the upgrade
can *appear* to be seamless and easy, and only fail in specific cases
on specific systems.

> Did you try to compile glib? No? Then I guess you've done no testing.

Um, I'm a ~arch user, so I am *always* testing.  But no, I didn't
recompile just glib to see if it would work in a mixed environment.
Nor did I re-compile each of the other 835 packages installed on my
system in turn with 4.1.1 to see if they would work in a mixed
environment.

But, did you happen to notice that the original poster of that glib
bug wasn't even using gcc 4.1?  How did you decide that it was a gcc
upgrade problem?  Indeed it looks more like a libtool issue to me...

Do you have some plan for testing new gcc releases in a mixed
compilation environment that will guarantee no compatibility problems?
 Something that won't take a year to complete so that new gcc versions
can move out of p.mask?

IMO, it would be much simpler and better to tell people to always do
an emerge -e world when upgrading gcc...

-Richard

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