Re: [gentoo-user] Update gentoo from live usb?

[Michael Jones]

On Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 01:36 Andreas Fink <finkandreas@×××.de> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have a couple of systems that I do not update regularily (some not
> even for years). But then sometimes I feel, hey I should do an update.
> I have one master build server which builds packages and keeps them as
> binary packages, annd all my systems pull the gentoo portage tree from
> this master build server, additionally also the configs in /etc/portage
> is the same amongst all boxes, i.e. use flags et al are all the same.
>
> Now comes the misery when I want to update an old box, because of
> unsupported EAPI and what not. One way that I used in the past was to
> extract a stage-3 tarball over the existing root system, and then do
> the upgrade, which works to some extent, but it does not seem right.
> Coming now to my question: Is it possible to start a live gentoo system
> with a recent portage version and then tell portage that it should
> install the packages in /mnt/gentoo (which is the real system I care
> about). I have heard about the prefix project, but I'm not sure if this
> is exactly what I want.
> Maybe a second approach would be to get the minimal set of binary
> packages from the master build server and extract them manually, such
> that I end up with a recent enough portage which supports all EAPIs
> that are in the tree. But I have no clue how to get the minimal set of
> packages that I would need to extract.
>
> Does anybody have other approaches (besides starting from scratch)?
>


Portage is supposed to offer an upgrade path for any system up to a year
out of date.

If you grab the version of portage from the last upgrade time of the system
being updated plus 6-12 months (however daring you feel like being) you
should be able to upgrade it that much without needing to do a lot of
fiddling.

Repeat until you're updated.


Going forward, you could consider having your build host take a snapshot /
backup of the binpkgs it builds every 3-6 months, with the associated
portage tree, so that you can use those to update your sporadically updated
machines.


I strongly recommend against overwriting your system with a stage3. Any
package that has a changed list of files will leave orphans behind. And
finding them all will be pretty dang hard.


Personally I just make a point to keep my not very large number of machines
updated, but I do it by hand. You might want to look and see if anyone's
written any scripts that automatically update + restart services / reboot
periodically, and email you upon problem

>