Re: [gentoo-user] dev-python/isodate breaks my emerge because it's at EAPI?

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Aug 3, 2021 at 2:03 AM n952162 <n952162@×××.de> wrote:
>
> Well, what you say is likely true, but does "old software" really need
> to be kept working?  Couldn't problems necessarily  only be dealt with
> in the newest versions?
>

I think you are misunderstanding what actually went wrong in your
situation.  Nothing broke in your existing software.

You're using an old version of portage.  It will continue to work as
it always has.

However, you wanted to use it with a newer version of the software
repository.  This contained a package that wasn't compatible with old
versions of portage.  The version of portage you're using detected
this, and refused to install it, so as to not randomly break your
system.  Your system continued to work as it always had.  You just
couldn't install that particular package, or anything that depends on
it.

Generally we try to maintain a reasonably sane upgrade path going back
maybe six months or so.  You just needed to update portage first.

If your system is more than a month or two out of date just running
emerge -uD world or whatever blindly is more likely to run into a
problem.  It shouldn't break your system unless you go adding random
options to the command line to override safety features, but it might
involve a few steps (like updating portage, @system, and so on before
trying to update everything).

It usually isn't unmanageable, but Gentoo is definitely not an
LTS-oriented distro.  If you want to only get security fixes for three
years and then update everything in one go, then stick with something
like RHEL, Ubuntu LTS, or debian stable.  Those distros deliver
exactly that sort of experience, and really there isn't as much
benefit to something like Gentoo if you're just going to update it
every other year anyway.

-- 
Rich